The influence of residual water on the secondary structure and crystallinity of freeze-dried fibrinogen.

The purpose of this work was to investigate the influence of water content on the secondary structure of a freeze-dried protein (fibrinogen) after a storage period of two weeks. To that end, attenuated reflectance Fourier transformed infrared (ATR-FTIR) and Raman spectra were generated and evaluated and the crystalline state of the fibrinogen bulks was determined via X-ray diffraction. First, a PCA (principal component analysis) of the spectral data was performed. While the α-helix and β-turn contents were increasing with the increasing water content, the β-sheet content was decreasing. A partial least squares (PLS) model was developed to correlate the mid-infrared and Raman spectral changes with the degree of crystallinity. The obtained R(2) value of 0.953 confirmed a correlation between changes in the secondary structure and crystallinity of the samples. The results demonstrated that the combined ATR-FTIR and Raman approach could be used to predict the crystalline state in freeze-dried fibrinogen products.