Cooperativity, Partially Bound States, and Enthalpy-Entropy Compensation

Cooperativity, partially bound states, and enthalpy-entropy compensation.

Efforts to develop a quantitative understanding of molecular recognition rely on the additivity of individual intermolecular interactions, and cooperativity represents one of the major potential stumbling blocks. A chemical double-mutant cycle has been used to experimentally measure cooperativity between functional group interactions within a complex framework. The interaction between two aroma...

Entropy-enthalpy compensation: fact or artifact?

The phenomenon of entropy-enthalpy (S-H) compensation is widely invoked as an explanatory principle in thermodynamic analyses of proteins, ligands, and nucleic acids. It has been suggested that this compensation is an intrinsic property of either complex, fluctuating, or aqueous systems. The questions examined here are whether the observed compensation is extra-thermodynamic (i.e., reflects any...

A fundamental view of enthalpy–entropy compensation

Entropy-enthalpy Compensation Conformational Fluctuation and Induced--t

A localized change in a protein, which occurs as a result of either ligand binding or single amino acid substitution, necessarily encounters the conformational uctuation of the rest of the protein. Both the entropy and the enthalpy associated with the change consist of contributions from uctuations in the atoms surrounding the localized site, but they compensate. A novel thermodynamic ensemble ...

Molecular rigidity and enthalpy-entropy compensation in DNA melting.

Enthalpy-entropy compensation (EEC) is observed in diverse molecular binding processes of importance to living systems and manufacturing applications, but this widely occurring phenomenon is not sufficiently understood from a molecular physics standpoint. To gain insight into this fundamental problem, we focus on the melting of double-stranded DNA (dsDNA) since measurements exhibiting EEC are e...