Detection of Ligand Binding to Proteins through Observation of Hydration Water

What is it about?

Binding of substrates and other ligands leads to changes in the hydration shell of proteins. This changes the infrared absorption of water, which can be detected with infrared spectroscopy. According to our knowledge, this paper is the first demonstration of this effect using phosphoenolpyruvate and Mg2+ binding to pyruvate kinase as an example.

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Why is it important?

Drug developments needs to detect binding of molecules to proteins. For this, often a specific test protocol needs to be developed which is time-consuming and costly. The key observation presented here paves the way for a general, label-free method to detect ligand binding to proteins.