Determining Ion-Pair Binding Affinities of Heteroditopic Receptor Systems.

Determining ion-pair affinities in heteroditopic receptor systems presents a persistent and significant challenge. The plethora of technical and experimental problems implicated in measuring ion-pair affinities have encouraged the use of several expedient experimental practices as a means of characterising ion-pair recognition behaviour. Exploiting a model heteroditopic receptor system, we interrogate the reliability of these methods and demonstrate that these commonly used techniques can be highly questionable and without extreme care can lead to incorrect conclusions.