Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) Spectroscopy

How do we characterize protein dynamics?  Our preferred method is heteronuclear NMR spectroscopy, which is uniquely suited to study both structure and dynamics in proteins and other biological macromolecules. A major advantage of NMR is that spectroscopic probes are distributed uniformly throughout the biomolecule, such as NH or CH atom pairs, providing large amounts of molecular information. To gain information on protein dynamics, NMR spin relaxation is highly sensitive to molecular motion over a range of timescales.

We look at the relaxation properties of ¹⁵N, ¹³C, ¹H, and ²H spins located throughout the protein scaffold, and interpret these in terms of amplitudes and timescales of individual bond vectors. Slower motions on the microsecond-millisecond timescale can be detected to yield site-specific kinetic, thermodynamic, and structural information on the switching between discrete conformational states. In many cases, these NMR-relaxation dynamics are used to complement other structural data from X-ray crystallography, or thermodynamic and kinetic biophysical measurements using methods such as fluorescence spectroscopy, calorimetry, amide hydrogen exchange, and molecular dynamics simulations. With the larger systems now under study (CM, TS), methyl-TROSY based experiments have become indispensable.