Impact of Urea on Detergent Micelle Properties

Co-solvents, such as urea, can entail drastic changes in the micellization behavior of detergents. We present a systematic quantification of the impact of urea on the critical micellar concentration, the micellization thermodynamics, and the micelle size in three homologous series of commonly used non-ionic alkyl detergents. To this end, we performed demicellization experiments by isothermal titration calorimetry and hydrodynamic size measurements by dynamic light scattering on alkyl maltopyranosides, cyclohexyl alkyl maltopyranosides, and alkyl glucopyranosides at urea concentrations of 0–8 M. For all detergents studied, we found that the critical micellar concentration increases exponentially because the absolute Gibbs free energy of micellization decreases linearly over the entire urea concentration range, as does the micelle size. In contrast, the enthalpic and entropic contributions to micellization reveal more complex, nonlinear dependences on urea concentration. Both free energy and size changes are more pronounced for long-chain detergents, which bury more apolar surface area upon micelle formation. The Gibbs free energy increments per methylene group within each detergent series depend on urea concentration in a linear fashion, although they result from the entropic term for alkyl maltosides but are of enthalpic origin for cyclohexyl alkyl maltosides. We compare our results to transfer free energies of amino acid side chains, relate them to protein-folding data, and discuss how urea-induced changes in detergent micelle properties affect in vitro investigations on membrane proteins.