Measurement Of Circular Dichroism Dynamics In A Nanosecond Temperature-Jump Experiment

The use of a fast temperature jump (T-jump) is a very powerful experiment aiming at studying protein denaturation dynamics. However, probing the secondary structure is a difficult challenge and rarely yields quantitative values. We present the technical implementation of far-UV circular dichroism in a nanosecond T-jump experiment and show that this experiment allows us to follow quantitatively the change in the helical fraction of a poly(glutamic acid) peptide during its thermal denaturation with 12 ns time resolution. (C) 2011 American Institute of Physics. [doi:10.1063/1.3592331]