AFM Study of Indirect Effect of Electric Discharge-Treated Steel on a Heme-Containing Enzyme

Heme-containing enzymes play vital functions in living organisms, including humans. Here we demonstrate two indirect effects of (electric discharge)-treated stainless steel on a model enzyme — horseradish peroxidase (HRP). The first effect is the complete loss of the enzyme’s adsorption after its incubation in grounded stainless steel chamber, which has been preliminarily subjected to electric discharge in air at atmospheric pressure. The second one is the formation of enzyme aggregates in the sample incubated in another grounded chamber two meters away from the discharge-treated one. At that, the HRP’s enzymatic activity is found to be unaffected in the both cases. These effects may be explained by the occurrence of knotted electromagnetic fields (KEMF). By using high-speed atomic force microscopy (HS-AFM), we reveal the relatively high surface mobility of cytochromes P450cam and P450 102A1 (BM3), whose isoelectric point (pI) values are acidic; at that, thymidylate synthase (TYMS) with near-neutral pI adsorbs strongly. Thus, HRP is the best model object, since its basic pI provides quite strong adsorption on mica. Since (electric discharge)-processed materials have found applications in medicine, we expect that the effects discovered will be considered in future biomedical applications of (electric discharge)-based technologies.