Band-selective heteronuclear dipolar recoupling with dual back-to-back pulses in rotating solids

Abstract

We propose a robust band-selective heteronuclear 15N-13C recoupling method using dual back-to-back (BABA) pulses (DBP). It contains four 90° pulses in each rotor period and corresponding phase cycling on each channel (13C and 15N). DBP aims at rapid band-selective heteronuclear magnetization transfer between 15N and 13Cα/13C′, whose efficiency is close to that of the well-known SPECIFIC CP in membrane proteins with relatively short relaxation time in rotating frame (T1ρ). Compared to SPECIFIC CP, DBP is very simple to set up and highly robust to RF variations. Thus, it can reduce the efforts in experimental optimization, especially for low-sensitive samples, and is very suitable for long-time or quantitative experiments. The efficacy of DBP is demonstrated by the E. coli diacylglycerol kinase (DAGK) proteoliposome. We anticipate that DBP would be useful for (segments of) membrane proteins that undergo the μs-ms timescale motions in magic-angle spinning (MAS) solid-state NMR.