The project is designed to develop new instrumentation and methods and to improve existing instrumentation and techniques for the characterization of biological macromolecules and for study of their interactions. Analytical ultracentrifugation, the techniques ancillary to it, and methods of data analysis using mathematical modeling appropriate for these techniques are the major areas of interest. Studies on the application of mathematical modeling to problems of ultracentrifugal analysis have continued. The applications of these studies are described in the project report 10184-07. Further progress has been made in the development of data acquisition systems. work is continuing on a direct digital acquisition system using the Macintosh II. New methods of performing experiments and analyzing data have been developed and work is continuing in this area. In particular, (1) extensive studies on the concentration dependence of sedimentation coefficients have been investigated; (2) the PC version of MLAB has been very extensively used and evaluated; (3) studies on the possible application of singular value decomposition techniques to the study of data from heterogeneous associations is being initiated.
