General description

Bovine serum albumin, a large molecular weight protein, accounts for around 10% of total whey proteins. It is a source of essential amino acids and is the third most abundant whey protein found in milk. BSA is biodegradable, biocompatible, nontoxic, and nonimmunogenic.

Application

Bovine Serum Albumin solution has been used:

as a component in Opti-minimum essential medium (MEM) to serve as the transfection media to study the effect of albumin on transfection efficiency
as a component in 0.1% Tween-20/PBS (PBST) in diluting primary antibodies to incubate cells
to incubate hydroxyapatite (HA) for in vitro study

Biochem/physiol Actions

Bovine serum albumin is capable of binding free fatty acids, other lipids, and flavor compounds. Because of its low cost, tolerance, and ease of preparation, BSA has been widely used in drug delivery. BSA can be used as a colloidal delivery system. It is also appealing as a nanoparticle matrix due to its low cost, ease of purification, and aqueous solubility. BSA nanoparticles can load several drugs and bioactive compounds due to drug binding sites in the BSA molecule.