In our fifth post on Understanding Kinetics, we consider the speed at which molecular complexes form. This is the fundamental mechanism underlying drug action (i.e. drugs inhibition their targets) and cellular signalling (i.e. ligands activate their receptors) and is probably the most important “kinetic effect” to consider in experimental design. Here again we use previously derived mathematical models1 to define some simple rules for the timescales/half-lives and magnitude of these reactions (figure above).
