Other approaches to the determination of protein structure

None of the several other physical methods that have been used to obtain information on the secondary and tertiary structure of proteins provides as much direct information as the X-ray diffraction technique. Most of the techniques, however, are much simpler than X-ray diffraction, which requires, for the resolution of the structure of one protein, many years of work and equipment such as electronic computers. Some of the simpler techniques are based on the optical properties of proteins—refractivity, absorption of light of different wavelengths, rotation of the plane polarized light at different wavelengths, and luminescence.