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Andy Vermilyea, a rising sophomore at Hamilton College, is one week away from completing his first summer science research project.  Andy has been working with Associate Dean of Faculty and Associate Professor of Chemistry Timothy Elgren, trying to work out bugs in the chemistry department's year-old ITC, or Isothermal TItration Calorimeter.  The machine is a modern, high tech version of the infamous "coffee-cup calorimeter," the crude device that many of us remember from high school chemistry classes, used to measure heats of reaction. 

The ITC measures the amount of heat absorbed or given off when one molecule is titrated into another, and then fits the data generated to a curve that provides thermodynamic values such as the binding constants and changes in enthalpy, or heat in the system.  The ITC is supposed to be very sensitive, but the data it generates can contain errors so large that they make it impossible to establish a trend.  Andy is working with two different chemical systems, carrying out reactions in an attempt to replicate experiments published previously.  His data seems to contradict the published results, and his job is to resolve this conflict by explaining the discrepancy.

To date, Vermilyea's research suggests that the published data is flawed, and that the machine itself is not suspect.  It appears that an unexpected endothermic (meaning heat is absorbed) event is occurring and interfering with the straight baseline to which the desired data is compared.  It is possible that two separate molecule binding events are occurring on his data curves, which could explain the discrepancy between results generated by this highly sensitive machine and those obtained from other methods.

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