Output details

Electrostatic depletion forces between planar surfaces

An understanding of salting-out forces is needed to develop methods for predicting protein solubility in aqueous salt solutions and for describing protein retention in chromatographic separations using hydrophobic resins. This paper is significant because we show that salting-out forces between proteins do not decay with the Debye Huckel screening length as suggested by electrostatic theories, but instead the range of the force is given by the Bjerrum length. This work demonstrates for the first time why salting-out interactions become stronger in moderately concentrated salt solutions.