How to Distinguish Conformational Selection and Induced Fit Based on Chemical Relaxation Rates

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Protein binding often involves conformational changes. Important questions are whether a conformational change occurs prior to a binding event ('conformational selection') or after a binding event ('induced fit'), and how conformational transition rates can be obtained from experiments. In this article, we present general results for the chemical relaxation rates of conformational-selection and induced-fit binding processes that hold for all concentrations of proteins and ligands and, thus, go beyond the standard pseudo-first-order approximation of large ligand concentration. These results allow to distinguish conformational-selection from induced-fit processes-also in cases in which such a distinction is not possible under pseudo-first-order conditions-and to extract conformational transition rates of proteins from chemical relaxation data.