Designing biodegradable surfactants and effective biomolecules with dissipative particle dynamics

Abstract

The design of a biodegradable, environmentally friendly surfactant is carried out, taking the structure of a known surfactant that lacks these qualities as the starting point, using mesoscopic computer simulations. The newly designed surfactant is found to perform at least as well as its predecessor, without the latter inimical characteristics. In the second part of this work, a comparative study of model proteins with different amino acid sequence interacting with surfaces is undertaken. The results show that, all other aspects being equal, this sequence is the key factor determining the optimal activity of the proteins near surfaces. These conclusions are found to be in agreement with recent experiments from the literature.