Biophysical Journal 65: 164-170 (1993)
© 1993 the Biophysical Society

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The binding capacity is a probability density function.

Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biophysics, Washington University School of Medicine, St. Louis, Missouri 63110.

ABSTRACT

The binding capacity of a system, or equivalently, the fluctuations of the number of ligands bound around the average value defined by the binding isotherm, can be regarded as a probability density function for the chemical potential of the ligand. The first moment of this density function is the mean ligand activity as defined by Wyman and gives the average free energy (in kT units) of binding per site. The second moment is directly related to the cooperativity of the system. These and higher moments can be obtained from numerical integration of experimental data in a direct way. An analytical expression for the moment generating function shows that the N independent coefficients of the partition function of a system containing N sites are uniquely defined by the first N moments of the binding capacity.