“…For this study we adopted Attenuated-Total-Reflected Fourier-Transformed Infrared (ATR FT-IR) spectroscopy, a powerful technique in chemical and structural characterization of very thin interfaces [16,17]. In order to identify the conditions to obtain uniform protein layers with low amount of contaminants we estimated the amide content [18][19][20][21], the lipid/amide and carbohydrate/amide ratios [22,23] of layers obtained by means of different preparation processes, namely two different protein purification procedures and various coating conditions. In fact both these steps can obviously influence the characteristics of hydrophobin layers and the macro-ATR FT-IR geometry adopted for spectra acquisition can be extremely useful to obtain averaged information on the entire examined surface of the layer.…”