Mechanism of bovine liver glutamate dehydrogenase self-assembly: III. Characterization of the association-dissociation stoichiometry with quasi-elastic light scattering

The homodyne light-scattering autocorrelation function originating in translational diffusion has been simulated for a polymerization model proposed for a number of self-associating systems: the sequential addition of identical monomer units to a growing aggregate, with identical equilibrium constants for each step. Both spherical and rigid rod structures have been considered. When applied to quasi-elastic light scattering data on glutamate dehydrogenase self-assembly, the simulation results indicate the formation of elongated polymers having equivalent and identical association sites. The weak response of translational diffusion coefficients to solution non-ideality leads to a valuable test of the unique equilibrium constant assumption. On the other hand, it is shown that successful exploitation of quasi-elastic light scattering data on aggregating systems of this type relies heavily on independent information.