Determination of secondary structure of normal fibrin from human peripheral blood

The secondary structure of human fibrin from normal donors and from bovine and suilline plasma was studied by Fourier transform ir spectroscopy and a quantitative analysis of its secondary structure was suggested. For this purpose, a previously experimented spectrum deconvolution procedure based on the use of the Conjugate Gradient Minimisation Algorithm with the addition of suitable constraints was applied to the analysis of conformation‐sensitive amide bands. This procedure was applied to amide I and III analysis of bovine and suilline fibrin, obtained industrially, and to amide III analysis of human fibrin clots. The analysis of both amide I and III in the first case was useful in order to test the reliability of the method. We found bovine, suilline, and human fibrin to contain about 30% α‐helix (amide I and III components at 1653 cm−1, and 1312 and 1284 cm−1, respectively), 40% β‐sheets (amide I and III components at 1625 and 1231 cm−1, respectively) and 30% turns (amide I and III components at 1696, 1680, 1675 cm−1, and 1249 cm−1, respectively). The precision of the quantitative determination depends on the amount of these structures in the protein. Particularly, the coefficient of variation is < 10% for percentage values of amide I and III components > 15 and 5%, respectively. The good agreement of our quantitative data, obtained separately by amide I and amide III analysis, and consistent with a previous fibrinogen (from commercial sources) study that reports only information about fibrin β‐sheet content obtained by factor analysis, leads us to believe that the amounts of secondary structures found (α‐helix, β‐sheets, and turns) are accurate. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Biopoly 41: 545–553, 1997.