The last three decades has seen some important advances in our ability to represent the conformation of proteins in solution on the basis of hydrodynamic measurements. Advances in theoretical modeling capabilities have been matched by commensurate advances in the precision of hydrodynamic measurements. We consider the advances in whole-body (simple ellipsoid-based) modeling-still useful for providing an overall idea of molecular shape, particularly for those systems where only a limited amount of data is available-and outline the ELLIPS suite of algorithms which facilitates the use of this approach. We then focus on bead modeling strategies, particularly the surface or shell-bead approaches and the HYDRO suite of algorithms. We demonstrate how these are providing great insights into complex issues such as the conformation of immunoglobulins and other multi-domain complexes.
Keywords: Bead and shell models; Solution conformation; Whole-body models.