This book provides the first systematic treatment of the thermodynamic theory of site-specific effects in biological macromolecules. It describes the phenomenological and conceptual bases required to allow a mechanistic understanding of these effects from analysis of experimental data. The thermodynamic theory also results in novel experimental strategies that enable the derivation of information on local, site-specific properties of a macromolecular system from analysis of perturbed global properties. The treatment focuses on binding phenomena, but is amenable to extension both conceptually...