Brown Patrick H, Schuck Peter
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering, National Institutes of Health, Bethesda, Maryland, MD 20892.
Comput Phys Commun. 2008 Jan 15;178(2):105-120. doi: 10.1016/j.cpc.2007.08.012.
Analytical ultracentrifugation allows one to measure in real-time the concentration gradients arising from the application of a centrifugal force to macromolecular mixtures in solution. In the last decade, the ability to efficiently solve the partial differential equation governing the ultracentrifugal sedimentation and diffusion process, the Lamm equation, has spawned significant progress in the application of sedimentation velocity analytical ultracentrifugation for the study of biological macromolecules, for example, the characterization of protein oligomeric states and the study of reversible multi-protein complexes in solution. The present work describes a numerical algorithm that can provide an improvement in accuracy or efficiency over existing algorithms by more than one order of magnitude, and thereby greatly facilitate the practical application of sedimentation velocity analysis, in particular, for the study of multi-component macromolecular mixtures. It is implemented in the public domain software SEDFIT for the analysis of experimental data.
分析超速离心法可让人们实时测量因对溶液中的大分子混合物施加离心力而产生的浓度梯度。在过去十年中，能够有效求解描述超速离心沉降和扩散过程的偏微分方程（即兰姆方程），在沉降速度分析超速离心法用于研究生物大分子方面取得了重大进展，例如，蛋白质寡聚状态的表征以及溶液中可逆多蛋白复合物的研究。本研究描述了一种数值算法，该算法在准确性或效率方面比现有算法提高了一个多数量级，从而极大地促进了沉降速度分析的实际应用，特别是对于多组分大分子混合物的研究。它在用于分析实验数据的公共领域软件SEDFIT中得以实现。
