Definition
Circular dichroism (CD) is the difference in absorption of the left and right circularly polarized light. It reports on the helical nature of spectroscopic transitions. CD spectroscopy is now more widely used to study biological molecules than nonbiological ones (Berova et al. 2000; Nordén et al. 2010). This is despite the fact that the molecules concerned are typically DNAs and proteins which are complex and detailed structural analysis of their CD spectra is not possible. The data analysis that is performed for such systems is usually qualitative or empirical in nature. Fitting algorithms (Wallace and Janes 2009; Hall et al. 2014a, b) for proteins and calculations can be used to enhance what can be deduced from the data.
The CD of biological macromolecules is mostly measured to investigate one of four things:
- 1.
The conformation of the macromolecule itself
- 2.
Changes in the conformation of the...
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References
Berova N, Nakanishi K, Woody RW (2000) Circular dichroism principles and applications, 2nd edn. Wiley-VCH, New York
Hall V, Sklepari M, Rodger A (2014a) Protein secondary structure prediction from circular dichroism spectra using a self-organizing map with concentration correction. Chirality 26:471–482
Hall V, Nash A, Rodger A (2014b) SSNN, a method for neural network protein secondary structure fitting using circular dichroism data. Anal Methods 6(17):6721–6726
Nordén B, Rodger A, Dafforn TR (2010) Linear dichroism and circular dichroism: a textbook on polarized spectroscopy. Royal Society of Chemistry, Cambridge
Wallace BA, Janes R (eds) (2009) Modern techniques for circular dichroism spectroscopy. IOS Press, Amsterdam
Woody RW (2007) Aromatic side chain contributions to protein circular dichroism. In: Uversky VN, Permyakov EA (eds) Luminescence spectroscopy and circular dichroism: methods in protein structure and stability. Nova, Hauppauge
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Rodger, A. (2018). Circular Dichroism Spectroscopy of Biomacromolecules. In: Roberts, G., Watts, A. (eds) Encyclopedia of Biophysics. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_638-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35943-9_638-1
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