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🧲 Surface Plasmon Resonance: Watching Molecules Bind in Real Time

Resonance angle:
Local refractive index:
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🧲 Surface Plasmon Resonance: Watching Molecules Bind in Real Time

This simulator demonstrates how surface plasmon resonance responds in real time to molecular binding events at a gold sensor surface within the Kretschmann prism-coupling configuration, showing how the reflectance dip angle shifts as analyte molecules associate with and dissociate from immobilized receptors, and how these shifts trace out a realistic sensorgram curve.

🔬 What It Demonstrates

This simulator demonstrates how surface plasmon resonance responds in real time to molecular binding events at a gold sensor surface within the Kretschmann prism-coupling configuration, showing how the reflectance dip angle shifts as analyte molecules associate with and dissociate from immobilized receptors, and how these shifts trace out a realistic sensorgram curve.

🎮 How to Use

Adjust the angle of incident light to locate the resonance dip in the reflectance curve, then start an analyte injection to watch the resonance angle shift as binding accumulates on the gold surface. Switch back to buffer flow to observe dissociation, and vary analyte concentration or the association and dissociation rate constants to see how they reshape the resulting sensorgram trace.

💡 Did You Know?

The evanescent field that surface plasmons generate penetrates only a few hundred nanometers into solution, roughly a thousand times thinner than a human hair, yet within that razor-thin zone SPR instruments can detect the binding of biomolecular layers only a few angstroms thick, sensitive enough to resolve single-digit-percent changes in surface coverage.