Mixed Macromolecular Crowding: A Protein and Solvent Perspective

In the living cell, biomolecules perform their respective functions in the presence of not only one type of macromolecules but rather in the presence of various macromolecules with different shapes and sizes. In this study, we have investigated the effects of five single macromolecular crowding agents, Dextran 6, Dextran 40, Dextran 70, Ficoll 70, and PEG 8000 and their binary mixtures on the modulation in the domain separation of human serum albumin using a Förster resonance energy transfer-based approach and the translational mobility of a small fluorescent probe fluorescein isothiocyanate (FITC) using fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS). Our observations suggest that mixed crowding induces greater cooperativity in the domain movement as compared to the components of the mixtures. Thermodynamic analyses of the same provide evidence of crossovers from enthalpy-based interactions to effects dominated by hard-sphere potential. When compared with those obtained for individual crowders, both domain movements and FITC diffusion studies show significant deviations from ideality, with an ideal solution being considered to be that arising from the sum of the contributions of those obtained in the presence of individual crowding agents. Considering the fact that domain movements are local (on the order of a few angstroms) in nature while translational movements span much larger lengthscales, our results imply that the observed deviation from simple additivity exists at several possible levels or lengthscales in such mixtures. Moreover, the nature and the type of deviation not only depend on the identities of the components of the crowder mixtures but are also influenced by the particular face of the serum protein (either the domain I-II or the domain II-III face) that the crowders interact with, thus providing further insights into the possible existence of microheterogeneities in such solutions.