Organization of Bovine Serum Albumin

In 1954 Colvin, Smith, and Cook advanced the concept of microheterogeneity of proteins. They concluded that a native protein should be described as a population of closely related individiuals which may differ either discretely or continuously in a number of properties and cited plasma albumin as an example. 

Serum albumin is commercially available as the following (1) Cohn 

An extensive amount of work has been devoted to an understanding of the origin of the heterogeneity of albumin, which may be summarized as follows  

Variation in the folding as revealed by differences in availability of disulfide bonds to reduction. 

Differences among various populations of serum albumin in their physicochemical properties. 

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