Binding capacity: cooperativity and buffering in biopolymers.

The group of linkage potentials resulting from the energy of a physicochemical system expressed per mol of a reference component, say a polyfunctional macromolecule, leads to the concept of binding capacity. This concept applies equally to both chemical and physical ligands and opens the way to consideration of higher-order linkage relationships. It provides a means of exploring the consequences of thermodynamic stability on generalized binding phenomena in biopolymers.