Chemists can now watch the structures of molecules as they change shape, much like shooting multiple frames of a galloping horse. The new view reveals that when certain molecules switch between different conformations, they do so less often than expected — a finding that could require chemists to revise their theories and that could lead to a better understanding of processes such as how proteins fold.
![Chemists can now watch as molecules such as cyclopropane carboxaldehyde (shown here) switch back and forth between two configurations.](https://i0.wp.com/www.sciencenews.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/7840.jpg?resize=300%2C190&ssl=1)
Brooks Pate of the University of Virginia in Charlottesville brought the time-honored chemistry tool called rotational spectroscopy into the digital era. His team can now collect data about molecules 100 to 10,000 times faster than was previously possible, essentially combining multiple frames in one shot. “It used to be that it would take three to four months” to take a similar amount of data, Pate says. “Now you can do it in one day.”
“It’s a very sleek little design,” comments John Pearson of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.