The impact of temperature changes on biological buffers’ pKa

forward from: https://www.hopaxfc.com/en/blog/6-biological-buffers-recommended-for-protein-purification

One of the main characteristics of Good’s buffers is that they suffer minimal changes related to temperature. However, slight temperature differences can still affect some of the buffers’ parameters, such as their pKa.

The pKa changes affect directly the buffering capacity of a system; therefore the pH of a buffer solution has to be set up according to the temperature at which the experiment will be performed. For example, if your experiment is going to be performed at 20°C, choose the buffer with the most suitable pKa value at this temperature.

The pKa of some buffers, such as Pipes, are not very sensitive to temperature changes, however, other chemicals such as Aces, Taps, Tes, Tris or Tricine can be more affected by a change of temperature. As a general rule, the effect of temperature in a buffer’s pKa can be reduced by avoiding primary amine buffers, like Tris.

The chart below presents the approximate pKa values of Hopax’s biological buffers according to the temperature:

For those interested in researching further, the professor Rabindra N. Roy (Drury University) has several published articles regarding the relations between temperature and buffers’ pka. Some of his articles can be found at Science Direct.

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References

1. Good, N.E. et al. (1966) Biochemistry 5, 467–477. Available at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi00866a011
2. Good, N.E. et al. (1966) Biochemistry 5, 467–477 / Good, N.E. & Izawa, S. (1972) Methods Enzymol. 24, 53–68 / Ferguson, W.J. et al. (1980) Anal. Biochem. 104, 300–310. Available at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi00866a011
3. Stoll, V.S. & Blanchard, J.S. (1990) Methods Enzymol. 182, 24–38 / Dawson, R.M.C. et al. (1986) Data for Biochemical Research. Clarendon Press, Oxford. Available at https://global.oup.com/academic/product/data-for-biochemical-research-9780198552994?cc=tw&lang=en&
4. Good, N.E. et al. (1966) Biochemistry 5, 467–477. Available at https://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/bi00866a011