Surface and interface analysis of functional proteins and peptides

Understanding proteins and peptides at the surfaces and interfaces are key to many biological processes and biotechnological development. Revealing quantitative and qualitative details of biomolecules at the interface not only provides further knowledge on these proteins and peptides, but also helps in improvement of life by providing rationale of new and efficient drug invention and biosensor device development. In this current chapter, some of these major analytical techniques used to characterise proteins and peptides are investigated, emphasising the basic theoretical principle of these techniques and some example applications. All these methods have various strengths and weaknesses. A short discussion on the usefulness of these techniques is given, to find highlight the most appropriate technique for the system under investigation. A comparison of the sensitivity between some of these techniques is also given where appropriate. Individual sections are arranged for each analytical technique and a future perspective is presented at the end.