ANALYSIS OF DATA CAPTURED BY AN ONLINE IMAGE CAPTURE SYSTEM FROM AN ANALYTICAL ULTRACENTRIFUGE USING SCHLIEREN OPTICS

The recent development in this laboratory of an automated data capture system, for refractometric optics on the analytical ultracentrifuge h as removed the requirement for tedious and time consuming manual acqui sition which had led to a decline in the use of schlieren optics. At t he same time this system has increased the amount of data easily avail able from such an optical system with maintained or increased precisio n. From the advent of such a system has arisen the need for a package to facilitate the analysis of these data and to extend the range of an alytical methods used. Using the improved data sets now available has also enabled us to successfully use methods which have lapsed in popul arity over the last two decades. We have also been able to successfull y apply radial derivative methods (Bridgman 1942) which have not routi nely been applied to the analysis of sedimentation velocity experiment s using schlieren optics. In this paper we describe the methods we hav e so far used to analyse data and present results for previously well defined molecules to demonstrate that the results obtained are reliabl e.