The Motions of an Enzyme Soloist

摘要

On page 262 of this issue, Yang et al. report a fluorescence study of the conformational fluctuations of a single enzyme molecule. As we can observe every time we boil an egg, proteins are not static. Conformational flexibility at various levels of their hierarchical structure enables proteins to fulfill a wide range of complex biological functions. Yang et al. now follow these fluctuations over a range of time scales at equilibrium, and not in response to some initial large disturbance.