Staring at protein-surfactant interactions: Fundamental approaches and comparative evaluation of their combinations - A review

Highlights: • Investigation of protein-surfactant interactions are important in chemistry. • Individual analytical approaches have limitations. • Overview of individual analytical approaches: cons and pros. • Combinations of current individual approaches to overcome their limitations. • Assessment of the efficiency and validity of combinations of analytical approaches. -- Abstract: Protein-surfactant interactions have been explored for decades owing to their widespread application in the pharmaceutical, food, and cosmetics industries and their importance to biochemical systems. However, they require further study owing to their compositional complexity and the innate limitations of current analytical approaches. In this review, we briefly introduce a series of individual approaches used for the qualitative and quantitative investigation of protein-surfactant interactions, including absorbance- or emission-based spectroscopy, scattering-based spectroscopy, mass spectrometry, calorimetry, computation and microscopy. More importantly, we then compare and evaluate various combinations of these approaches and provide comprehensive critical assessments and comments regarding their application to the advanced study of protein-surfactant interactions at the molecular level.