The new instrument, intended mainly for characterizing proteins and nucleic acids, has already helped to shatter the working models of some important biological problems and to point research efforts in promising new directions, especially in areas of drug discovery.
Reasons given for the resurgence of the analytical ultracentrifuge vary. Some say the field withered because the commercially available technology stagnated almost 30 years ago. Those who wanted to continue working with the tool had to take on many of the upkeep tasks and the needed modifications themselves. But others say the kinds of questions asked in biology changed in the early 1980s, leading researchers away from the analytical ultracentrifuge, and that those questions now have changed again, encouraging a reappraisal of the instrument.
"The nature of research changed from a very quantitative period in the '60s and '70s to a very qualitative one," says Howard Schachman, a molecular biologist at ...
