and Summary.-The purpose of this report is to call attention to the probable biological utility of a physical constant, the temperature of compensation (Tj) We suggest that determination of T, in biological systems might be of value in (1) establishment of whether an observed phenomenon results from the same process or mechanism as another observed phenomenon; (2) prediction of rates-or other behavior under relevant conditions; and (3) classification.The compensation effect' is simply defined as that which occurs when a series of Arrhenius plots, related by variation of a single parameter, pass through a common point. The temperature for this point has been termed the temperature of compensation. Systems exhibiting the compensation (or isokinetic) effect show linear variation of change in enthalpy with change in entropy, and the slope IjH/iS is T,, which is the temperature of compensation (or isokinetic temperature). 2 Although the compensation effect has been extensively studied by physicists and chemists, relatively little attention has been paid to it by biologists. We have investigated the effect of salt concentration on the kinetics of thermal inactivation of Sindbis virus at different temperatures as a biological example of the compensation effect. We propose that the temperature of compensation is a physical constant of biological interest since we found that, by determining the rate of thermal inactivation of the virus in different concentrations of two different salts, both families of Arrhenius plots generated from these data indicate the same temperature of compensation within fairly close limits.
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