Role of Proteins as New Molecular Markers for Analyzing Material Structures to Prevent Traumatic Brain Injuries

Abstract

Development of new products for the prevention of traumatic brain injuries are mostly based on mechanical investigations. However, there is a demand for new and more sophisticated analyzes focusing on molecular levels to improve protective equipment. Recently we evaluated the mature protein laminin LN521 to find out the consequences to dynamic and semi-static impact and found substantial fragmentation and aggregation of the laminin structures. The objective in the present study was to analyze the effect of polymer materials to prevent the cell membrane protein Laminin from being denatured and, hence, reducing impacts to the head evaluated by using two different mechanical methods, denatured electrophoresis and electron microscopy. Thus, following dynamic impacts without and with the polymer materials the results showed a significant reduction of the force as well as the translational acceleration with up to over 50%. Also, in the present laboratory investigation the mature laminin was used following dynamic impact to find out if this molecule can serve as a complementary analyzer to mechanical methods when searching for optimal protective materials. The results showed that the polymer materials had the capacity to save the laminin structures from both fragmentation and aggregation as evaluated with denatured electrophoresis and electron microscopy. Therefore, proteins may complement today's calculation simulations and mechanical investigations in the search for improved protective systems to the skull bone and brain tissue. The present result shows that laminin structures may become a valuable method to further identify new structures on a molecular level in the search for improved protective materials to the brain tissue at physical exercise and at accidents.