There are environmental, cost and health concerns with regard to use of aluminum salts, iron salts and synthetic polymers as coagulants in water treatment. Therefore, it is desirable to develop other cost-effective and more environmentally acceptable water treatment materials such as organic plant derived materials. The seeds of the Moringa oleifera (MO) plant have been used for water treatment for quite sometime but there are still a number of challenges. The main concern in using MO seeds is the significant increase in organic load and so the water treated with the crude MO seeds extract should not be stored for more than 24 hours and also it is not suitable for large water supply systems where the hydraulic residence time is very high. The active ingredient in the seeds extract is said to be a coagulant protein but the mechanism is still not well understood. Currently, the extraction methods are not only time consuming but also the molecular weight of the extracted protein depends on the method used. Therefore, it is necessary to develop less time consuming methods of extracting the protein. It is suggested that the protein extract is positively charged but this again could be a pH dependent factor. Protein-surfactant interactions are important in mixed systems which are widely encountered in food, cosmetic and medicine formulations. The study gives an insight in physical and structural properties of the MO seeds protein which depend on amino acid composition, secondary structure, conformational stability, and surface distribution of non-polar amino acid residues. In order to address some of the above challenges, the physicochemical properties of the protein extracted from seeds and its interaction with surfactants (especially anionic surfactant, sodium dodecyl sulphate) have been investigated using spectroscopy (infrared, UV, fluorescence and circular dichroism), surface tension and capillary viscometry.