FCS is sometimes used to study molecular interactions using differences in diffusion times (e.g. the product of an association reaction will be larger and thus have larger diffusion times than the reactants individually); however, FCS is relatively insensitive to molecular mass as can be seen from the following equation relating molecular mass to the diffusion time of globular particles (e.g. proteins):
where  is the viscosity of the sample and  is the molecular mass of the fluorescent species. In practice, the diffusion times need to be sufficiently different—a factor of at least 1.6—which means the molecular masses must differ by a factor of 4. Dual color fluorescence cross-correlation spectroscopy (FCCS) measures interactions by cross-correlating two or more fluorescent channels (one channel for each reactant), which distinguishes interactions more sensitively than FCS, particularly when the mass change in the reaction is small.