Monitoring Protein Denaturation of Egg White Using Passive Microwave Radiometry (MWR)

Passive microwave radiometry (MWR) is a measurement technique based on the detection of passive radiation in the microwave spectrum from different objects. This radiation in equilibrium is known to be proportional to the thermodynamic temperature of an emitting body. We hypothesize that living systems feature other mechanisms of emission that are based on protein unfolding and water rotational transitions. To understand the nature of these emissions, microwave radiometry has been used in several in vitro experiments. In our study, we performed pilot measurements of microwave emissions from egg whites during denaturation induced by ethanol. Egg whites are 10% proteins such as albumins, mucoproteins, and globulins. We found a novel phenomenon that microwave emissions changed without a corresponding change of the water thermodynamic temperature. increase 100 times faster than thermodynamic temperature. We have also found striking differences between microwave emission and thermodynamic temperature kinetics. Therefore, we hypothesize that these two processes are unrelated, contrary to what was thought before. It is known that some pathologies like stroke or brain trauma feature increased microwave emissions. We hypothesize that this phenomenon originates from protein denaturation and is not related to the thermodynamic temperature. So, our finding could explain first time the reason for microwave emissions increase after trauma and postmortem. It could be used for the development of novel diagnostics methods. The MWR method is inexpensive, and it does not require fluorescent or radioactive labels. It can be used in different areas of basic and applied pharmaceutical research, including kinetics studies in biomedicine.