Isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) is an extremely sensitive technique to assess for the formation/disruption of complex chemical/biological species in solution. During the last years, the increase in instrument sensitivity as well as the reduction of the sample concentration required to perform experiments, have made possible to expand the application range of ITC, which is expected to continue growing.
Quality of the ITC Raw Data?
The amount and the quality of useful information that can be obtained from an ITC experiment depend on several factors including the purity of the samples, the concentration of the solutions prepared, the choice of injection volume and its length in time. The researcher handling the instrument is responsible for the appropiate selection of these variables as part of the experimental setup. They can be optimized on the basis of previous experience and also taking advantage of computational simulations. A key factor for this is that ITC is an incremental technique and so the results depend strongly on the injection volume employed to perform the experiment.