Survey of the year 2008: applications of isothermal titration calorimetry

Isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) is a fast, accurate and label-free method for measuring the thermodynamics and binding affinities of molecular associations in solution. Because the method will measure any reaction that results in a heat change, it is applicable to many different fields of research from biomolecular science, to drug design and materials engineering, and can be used to measure binding events between essentially any type of biological or chemical ligand. ITC is the only method that can directly measure binding energetics including Gibbs free energy, enthalpy, entropy and heat capacity changes. Not only binding thermodynamics but also catalytic reactions, conformational rearrangements, changes in protonation and molecular dissociations can be readily quantified by performing only a small number of ITC experiments. In this review, we highlight some of the particularly interesting reports from 2008 employing ITC, with a particular focus on protein interactions with other proteins, nucleic acids, lipids and drugs. As is tradition in these reviews we have not attempted a comprehensive analysis of all 500 papers using ITC, but emphasize those reports that particularly captured our interest and that included more thorough discussions we consider exemplify the power of the technique and might serve to inspire other users