Any popular experiment in chemistry that digital signal processing played a crucial role in?

Is there any famous experiment in chemistry where digital signal processing played an important part? I don't mean using a machine that relies on such techniques (they all do) but an experiment where signals were first recorded (e.g. temperature/pressure/voltage/etc. as a function of time) and then analyzed with some sophisticated methods (e.g. time-frequency analysis with wavelets).




Many spectroscopic experiments record analog data, which is subsequently Fourier transformed to give a frequency-domain spectrum. For example, in a nuclear magnetic resonance experiment, the signal emitted by an excited nucleus is picked up as a voltage in an RF coil for 1-2 sec. This time-domain signal is processed then converted to the frequency domain by FT. 


As for 'popular', Richard Ernst won the 1991 Nobel in Chemistry for his contributions to this field of research. 


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How about the [patch-clamp technique](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patch_clamp) in neurochemistry? This technique allowed the study of ionic currents through single molecules of a voltage-gated ion channel. It won the [Nobel prize](http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1991/press.html) in 1991. 


The signal processing required to simply observe the single-molecule opening and closing events is fairly minor. However, processing single-molecule ion-current data for multiple experiments when inhibitors are titrated, or to compare ensemble-average kinetics to single- molecule kinetics, can be fairly complex.


Here is a paper from 1998 on single-molecule enzymology; it's an extension of the patch-clamp experiments developed for the specific case of single-molecule ion channels: <http://www.sciencemag.org/content/282/5395/1877.full> Read the paper for a better description of some of the signal processing involved.


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