I have not been able to find SDS solubility information for various water immiscible solvents. I have been looking into aliphatic (e.g. mineral oil) and lipophilic (e.g. olive oil) solutions and have had little success to date. I’ll probably try castor oil next but not excited about working with such a viscous material. Any insight or a link to SDS/oil solubility information would be greatly appreciated.
I should also mention due to my application I'm not willing to use solvents with hazardous fumes (e.g. acetone) or a low flash point (e.g. n-butanol).
You should consider instead complexes of dodecyl sulfate with cationic surfactants or its salts with di- and trivalent cations. It is nature that salts with high solubility in water are almost insoluble in water immiscible solvents.
What is the background of your question?
Titus, I'm interested in deliverying agents for cell lysis and denaturation via partitioning. I need the surfactant 'delivery solution' to be relatively non-polar to minimize loss of biomolecules (it doesn't have to be completely immiscible with water). My challenge is finding the right balance between high surfactant solubility (e.g. sds, tritonx100) and low biomolecule solubility - while keeping cost & health risks minimal. I'm going to try out octanol next week, it might do the trick..
Depending on the nature of the biomolecules relatively low concentration of surfactant might be successful to induce transfer into hydrophobic phase. In case of electrostatic attraction the complex formed might exhibit enhanced solubility in hydrophobic phase. For nonionic surfactants it is known that with a range of uncharged compounds cloud point is lowered and in addition aqueous solubility of the uncharged compounds. In both cases surplus surfactant concentration in micellar form will have the adverse effect of solubilization.
Beside this you may use nonionic surfactants for cloud point extraction.
Good luck.
SDS has some solubility in toluene. I am not sure if you can use toluene for your system. Otherwise, I am partly in agreement with the above, you can form complexes in the aqueous phase with proteins of your choice and partitioning the complex in the organic phase.
Thanks for feedback. I agree with both of you regarding how surfactants will indeed make it possible for biomolecules to enter the water-immiscibile phase. But, I'm comparing loss with the current approach which uses aqueous based delivery - and significant lose is observed via diffusion and convection. Even a 50% improvement would be useful.
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