Early Events in Protein Folding Explored by Rapid Mixing Methods.

The article presents the developments in rapid mixing methods and their application to research on early stages of protein folding. Advances in the mixer design and detection methods extend the time resolution up to the millisecond time range. Rapid mixing techniques include turbulent mixing, stopped-flow mixing and continuous-flow techniques. Some of the common detection methods used in rapid mixing studies of the kinetics of protein folding are tryptophan fluorescence, fluorescence energy transfer, continuous-flow absorbance, small-angle x-ray scattering and others.