Biocalorimetry 2
Applications of Calorimetry in the Biological Sciences
Chapter One
Applications of Biocalorimetry:
Binding, Stability and Enzyme
Kinetics
Ronan O'Brien and Ihtshamul Haq
1.1 Introduction
The past 50 years has witnessed the accumulation of a huge amount of high-resolution
structural data on biological molecules and their complexes. These
NMR and X-ray crystallography studies have been crucial for our improved
understanding of cellular processes. Structural biology has provided a three-dimensional
picture of nucleic acids and proteins and thus helped us to
appreciate how structure is related to function. Nearly all the chemistry of life
is mediated through non-covalent interactions between molecules, and some
of the most important of these reactions involve proteins and nucleic acids.
High-resolution structures of these complexes are important for elucidating
the shape complementarity of interacting surfaces and the exact spacial
orientation of functional groups on interacting molecules. Thus numbers of
hydrogen bonds are enumerated and hydr ... read full excerpt from Biocalorimetry 2: Applications of Calorimetry in the Biological Sciences ebook
