Amino-acid selective experiments on uniformly 13C and 15N labeled proteins by MAS NMR: Filtering of lysines and arginines

Amino-acid selective magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR experiments can aid the assignment of ambiguous cross-peaks in crowded spectra of solid proteins. In particular for larger proteins, data analysis can be hindered by severe resonance overlap. In such cases, filtering techniques may provide a good alternative to site-specific spin-labeling to obtain unambiguous assignments that can serve as starting points in the assignment procedure. In this paper we present a simple pulse sequence that allows selective excitation of arginine and lysine residues. To achieve this, we make use of a combination of specific cross-polarization for selective excitation [M. Baldus, A.T. Petkova, J. Herzfeld, R.G. Griffin, Cross polarization in the tilted frame: assignment and spectral simplification in heteronuclear spin systems, Mol. Phys. 95 (1998) 1197-1207.] and spin diffusion for transfer along the amino-acid side-chain. The selectivity of the filter is demonstrated with the excitation of lysine and arginine side-chain resonances in a uniformly 13C and 15N labeled protein preparation of the alpha-spectrin SH3 domain. It is shown that the filter can be applied as a building block in a 13C-13C lysine-only correlation experiment.     

Improvement of resolution in solid state NMR spectra with J-decoupling: an analysis of lineshape contributions in uniformly C-enriched amino acids and proteins

In magic angle spinning (MAS) NMR spectra of highly and uniformly 13C,15N-enriched amino acids and proteins, homo-nuclear coupling interactions contribute significantly to the 13C linewidths, particularly for moderate applied magnetic field strengths and sample spinning frequencies. In this work, we attempted to dissect, analyze, and control the contributions of J-coupling and residual homo-nuclear dipolar coupling interactions to the linewidths of uniformly 13C,15N-enriched crystalline alanine; these studies were carried out at 9.4 T using a range of spinning frequencies from 5 to 15 kHz. The anisotropic second-order dipolar shifts and the J-splittings are comparable in their contribution to the linewidths, but behave very differently in terms of experimental protocols for line narrowing. In contrast to the J-coupling interactions, the second-order dipolar broadening cannot be refocused using selective pulses on the passively coupled spin. We carried out experiments to remove or refocus the 13C J-coupling interactions (omega1 J-decoupling) using a selective DANTE pulse in the center of the indirect evolution period. Inversion profiles and bandwidths of selective DANTE pulses acting on transverse magnetization, in the regime of moderate spinning frequencies, were characterized computationally and experimentally. A dramatic improvement in the resolution of the 2D spectrum was achieved when this decoupling protocol was employed.