Tools and methods for circular dichroism spectroscopy of proteins: a tutorial review

Circular dichroism (CD) spectroscopy is a widely-used method in biochemistry, structural biology and pharmaceutical chemistry. More than 24 000 papers published in the past decade have included CD characterisations of proteins; many of those studies have also included other complementary chemical, biophysical, and computational chemistry methods. This tutorial review describes the background to the technique of CD spectroscopy and good practice methods for high quality data collection. It specifically focuses on both established and new methods and tools available for experimental design and interpretation, data processing, visualisation, analysis, validation, archiving, and accession, including tools developed to enhance the complementarity of this method with other structural and chemical biology studies. This tutorial review discusses current methods and resources available for good practice data collection and analyses of circular dichroism spectroscopy, a widely-used method for examining the structures and conformational changes of proteins.