Circular Dichroism

The Biophysical Core maintains a Jasco J-715 spectropolarimeter for both near- and far-UV circular dichroism studies. The instrument contains a Peltier thermostated sample holder for thermal melts.

Fees
UCONN users: a small fee (about $2 per hour) to cover maintenance costs.
External academic users: $8-50 per hour.

http://www.jascoinc.com

Overview

Circular dichroism spectroscopy (CD) is very sensitive to the secondary structure of polypeptides and proteins. Circular dichroism is a form of light absorption spectroscopy that measures the difference in absorbance of right- and left-circularly polarized light (rather than the commonly used absorbance of isotropic light) by a substance. It has been shown that CD spectra between 260 and approximately 180 nm can be analyzed for the different secondary structure types: alpha helix, beta sheet, beta turn, random coils, etc. Secondary structure determination by CD is reported to achieve accuracies of 0.97 for helices, 0.75 for beta sheet, 0.50 for turns, and 0.89 for other structure types.

CD References

	Circular Dichroism, Principles and Applications, Edited by K. Nakanishi and N. Berova, VCH Publishers (1994) ISBN 1-56081-618-X
	Circular Dichroism and the Conformational Analysis of Biomolecules, Edited by G. Fasman, Plenum Press (1996) ISBN 0-306-45142-5
	Analytical Applications of Circular Dichroism, Edited by N. Purdie, Elsevier Science (1994) ISBN:0-444-89508-6
	Circular Dichroism and Linear Dichroism, Alison Rodger and Bengt Norden, Oxford University Press (1997) ISBN 0-19-855897-X
	Organic Conformational Analysis and Stereochemistry from Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy, David A. Lightner and Jerome E. Gurst, Wiley - VCH, (2000) ISBN 0-471-35405-8
	Analytical Biochemistry, (1996) 235, pp. 1-10
	Proteins: Structure, Function, Genetics (1990) 7, pp.205-214