Effect of Chinese medicine alpinetin on the structure of human serum albumin Original Research Article

Alpinetin (7-hydroxy-5-methoxyflavanone), one of the main constituents from the seeds of Alpinia katsumadai Hayata, belongs to flavonoids with its usefulness as antibacterial, anti-inflammatory and other important therapeutic activities of significant potency and low systemic toxicity. In this paper, the interaction of alpinetin to human serum albumin (HSA) has been studied for the first time by spectroscopic method including Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectroscopy, circular dichroism (CD), and UV-absorption spectroscopy in combination with fluorescence quenching study under physiological conditions with drug concentrations of 3.3 × 10−6–2.0 × 10−5 mol/L. The results of spectroscopic measurements and the thermodynamic parameters obtained (the enthalpy change ΔH0 and the entropy change ΔS0 were calculated to be −10.20 kJ/mol and 53.97 J/mol K−1 according to the Van’t Hoff equation) suggest that hydrophobic interaction is the predominant intermolecular forces stabilizing the complex, which is also good agreement with the results of molecule modeling study. The alterations of protein secondary structure in the presence of alpinetin in aqueous solution were quantitatively estimated by the evidences from FT-IR and CD spectroscopy with reductions of α-helices about 24%, decreases of β-sheet structure about 2%, and increases of β-turn structure about 21%. The quenching mechanism and the number of binding site (n ≈ 1) were obtained by fluorescence titration data. Fluorescent displacement measurements confirmed that alpinetin bind HSA on site III. In addition, the effects of common ions on the constants of alpinetin–HSA complex were also discussed.