The importance of the treatment of ITC raw data in calorimetry experiments

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.

Kinetic information from ITC Experiments

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Direct reading of Microcal Origin OPJ files with AFFINImeter

Direct reading of Microcal Origin OPJ files with AFFINImeter

The direct reading  Microcal Origin OPJ files has been recently implemented in AFFINImeter. Initially, only OPJ files containing a single datasheet were allowed. Our code has just been modified to make possible the reading of OPJ files with multiple datasheets. Additionally the uploaded OPJ files are now being filtered to permit just the selection of datasheets suitable for analysis with AFFINImeter (i.e. datasheets of ITC isotherms). Some minor improvements that optimize this process have also been implemented.
Soon you will also be able to directly upload Microcal Origin itc files. In collaboration with our scientific advisor Prof. Philippe Dumas, from the University of Strasbourg, we are currently implementing a procedure to automate the integration of the raw ITC data, including removal of noise and baseline correction.