ABSTRACT
It is sometimes stated that whenever an important new method becomes available for study in a certain scientic eld, this gives rise to a whole new aspect of the eld. This is certainly true for most chemical research areas. This section will cover some traditional and some relatively new methods available for studies of peptides and proteins. The methods concentrate on structure at different levels. It should be remembered that it was only a few decades ago that the rst three-dimensional protein structures were presented, with a Nobel Prize going to John Kendrew and Max Perutz in 1962 for the crystallographic structures of myoglobin and hemoglobin, respectively-work that had been completed only a few years before. Their results emphasized the deep insight that the particular three-dimensional fold of a protein determines its unique function, a truth that nowadays we take for granted. Even if the structures were determined in the crystalline state, it soon became evident that they represented the true native state, since, for example, catalytic activity could be found also in crystalline enzymes.
