The Need to Distinguish Colloidal and Thermal Stability for Proteins.

Protein stability is crucial in the development of drug formulations and in understanding many aspects of protein behavior. It is known that both thermal and colloidal protein stability are modulated by the presence of small molecules. Because thermal stability is easier to assess than colloidal stability, it is often used as a proxy for evaluating the latter. In this Mini-Review, we argue that these two aspects of stability have to be considered separately, although they should be related in some complex way.