Does the ligand-biopolymer equilibrium binding constant depend on the number of bound ligands?

Conventional methods, such as Scatchard or McGhee-von Hippel analyses, used to treat ligand-biopolymer interactions, indirectly make the assumption that the microscopic binding constant is independent of the number of ligands, i, already bound to the biopolymer. Recent results on the aggregation of aromatic molecules (Beshnova et al., J Chem Phys 2009, 130, 165105) indicated that the equilibrium constant of self-association depends intrinsically on the number of molecules in an aggregate due to loss of translational and rotational degrees of freedom on formation of the complex. The influence of these factors on the equilibrium binding constant for ligand-biopolymer complexation was analyzed in this work. It was shown that under the conditions of binding of "small" molecules, these factors can effectively be ignored and, hence, do not provide any hidden systematic error in such widely-used approaches, such as the Scatchard or McGhee-von Hippel methods for analyzing ligand-biopolymer complexation. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Biopolymers 93: 932-935, 2010.