Chemists have measured how much a bond between two atoms stretches in the transition state, which is the short-lived phase between the initial and end states in a chemical reaction.
Sri Rama Koti Ainavarapu and Julio Fernandez at Columbia University in New York and their colleagues developed a force clamp technique to use in 'single-molecule force spectroscopy'. Using this, they held onto individual molecules and stretched them so as to trigger the reduction of a disulphide bond in a protein, invoking the transition state of the reaction. The researchers could then measure the distance between the sulphur atoms as they stretched apart.
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Chemistry: Disulphide dichotomies. Nature 453, 261 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/453261d
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/453261d