Infrared spectroscopy has been used to map substrate-protein interactions: the conformational changes of the sarcoplasmic reticulum Ca 2؉ -ATPase upon nucleotide binding and ATPase phosphorylation were monitored using the substrate ATP and ATP analogues (2 -deoxy-ATP, 3 -deoxy-ATP, and inosine 5 -triphosphate), which were modified at specific functional groups of the substrate. Modifications to the 2 -OH, the 3 -OH, and the amino group of adenine reduce the extent of bindinginduced conformational change of the ATPase, with particularly strong effects observed for the latter two. This demonstrates the structural sensitivity of the nucleotide-ATPase complex to individual interactions between nucleotide and ATPase. All groups studied are important for binding and interactions of a given ligand group with the ATPase depend on interactions of other ligand groups.Phosphorylation of the ATPase was observed for ITP and 2 -deoxy-ATP, but not for 3 -deoxy-ATP. There is no direct link between the extent of conformational change upon nucleotide binding and the rate of phosphorylation showing that the full extent of the ATP-induced conformational change is not mandatory for phosphorylation. As observed for the nucleotide-ATPase complex, the conformation of the first phosphorylated ATPase intermediate E1PCa 2 also depends on the nucleotide, indicating that ATPase states have a less uniform conformation than previously anticipated.Ligand binding to proteins controls vast numbers of cellular processes and has attracted great scientific and economic interest. Protein and ligand flexibility are important determinants of the interaction and often lead to ligand binding modes that are not anticipated from structures obtained with other ligands. To these "failure(s) of the rigid receptor hypothesis" (1) is added here an impressive example: induced-fit binding of nucleotides to the Ca 2ϩ -ATPase. This finding stems from a systematic mapping of substrate-protein interactions with infrared (IR) 1 spectroscopy. New approaches like this are welcome in the field of ligand-protein recognition, since the most informative techniques, NMR and x-ray crystallography, are laborious and problematic for some systems. Methods like fluorescence and luminescence that require less expenditure also provide less molecular information. We expect that this technology gap will be bridged by IR spectroscopy.IR spectroscopy, one of the methods of vibrational spectroscopy, provides direct information on the molecular level, is cost-effective, and can be universally applied from small soluble proteins to large membrane proteins under near-physiological conditions. Work summarized in recent reviews (2-5) has shown that the vibrational spectrum changes characteristically when a ligand binds to a protein. This provides a direct observation of ligand binding: no marker compound has to be introduced to report the binding process, as with many other methods. Previous work has mostly focused on individual interactions between a ligand and a protein by monitoring the ...