Techniques and instrumentation that involve fluorescence are used in many careers related to biology and biochemistry. However, due to the expense of instrumentation, the theory and practice of fluorescence spectroscopy is commonly concentrated in instrumental analysis in most curricula, a class rarely required for biology and biochemistry majors.…

Enzyme kinetics measurements are a standard component of undergraduate biochemistry laboratories. The combination of serine hydrolases and fluorogenic enzyme substrates provides a rapid, sensitive, and general method for measuring enzyme kinetics in an undergraduate biochemistry laboratory. In this method, the kinetic activity of multiple protein…

Surface plasmon resonance (SPR) spectroscopy is a powerful, label-free technique to monitor noncovalent molecular interactions in real time and in a noninvasive fashion. As a label-free assay, SPR does not require tags, dyes, or specialized reagents (e.g., enzymes-substrate complexes) to elicit a visible or a fluorescence signal. During the last…

Describes an exercise that allows the measurement of the sizes of biological samples by means of the diffraction of light. (JRH)