Thermodynamics and Reaction Kinetics, Revisited
It has been almost 10 years since I last took a thermodynamics course and so for recent research investigations, I have gone back to brush up on the basics. This post is mostly going to be a thermodynamics and rate kinetics cheat sheet. At a high level, I wanted to understand thermodynamics and rate kinetics in the context of DNA nanotechnology, because these concepts give important insight into how DNA nanostructures form. The difference between thermodynamics and rate kinetics is that thermodynamics describes what direction a reaction will take, while rate kinetics provides information on how quickly that reaction will occur [1]. We’ll start by discussing thermodynamics and then look at where rate kinetics fill in the gaps.