Cooperativity: over the Hill

Cooperativity, the ability of ligand binding at one site on a macromolecule to influence ligand binding at a different site on the same macromolecule, is a fascinating biological property that is often poorly explained in textbooks. The Hill coefficient is commonly used in biophysical studies of cooperative systems although it is not a quantitative measure of cooperativity. The free energy of interaction between binding sites (delta delta G) is a more stringent definition of cooperativity and provides a direct quantitative measure of how the binding of ligand at one site affects the ligand affinity of another site.