MECHANISMS AND USES OF HYDROGEN-EXCHANGE

Recent work has largely completed our understanding of the hydrogen-ex change chemistry of unstructured proteins and nucleic acids. Some of t he high-energy structural fluctuations that determine the hydrogen-exc hange behavior of native macromolecules have been explained; others re main elusive. A growing number of applications are exploiting hydrogen -exchange behavior to study difficult molecular systems and elicit oth erwise inaccessible information on protein structure, dynamics and ene rgetics.