The Filtration Induced by a Locally Nilpotent Derivation

We investigate the filtration corresponding to the degree function induced by a non-zero locally nilpotent derivations and its associated graded algebra. As an application we provide an efficient method to recover the Makar-Limanov invariants, isomorphism classes and automorphism groups of classically known algebras. We also present a new class of examples which can be fully described with this method.