The effect of receptor site nonuniformity on the measurement of rate constants

The BIAcore is an instrument for measuring rate constants in real time by using a surface-volume geometry. Though current models for the resulting reaction include transport effects for the reactant in solution, they do not account for spatial nonuniformities in the reactant attached to the wall. This work accounts for such nonuniformities and establishes that in the limit of small Damköhler number, such effects are negligible due to the averaging characteristics of the instrumentation.