ChemInform Abstract: Low-Temperature Solid-State NMR of Proteins

Abstract

In surveying the literature of solid-state NMR it is striking that the ratio of reviews to original publications is unusually high. We believe that this reflects on the one hand the evident great potential of this technique for the study of chemical and biological systems, and on the other the formidable technical obstacles to be overcome in obtaining useful results. Despite some reluctance to worsen the review/publication ratio still further, we hope in this article to address, in particular, the community of potential users of solid-state NMR in biology, providing a survey of the area that highlights the practical problems and the means by which they may be tackled, and outlining the results obtained to date within the title field. It is not the intent to provide a comprehensive discussion of the physical hasis of solid-state NMR, which may readily he obtained from other sources,lb but a brief qualitative discussion is included to set the context. Likewise, some selected experimental techniques are described in section IV, but this is not intended to be a complete survey. Reviews of the technique of solid-state NMR can be found elsewhere.?,8 There are also prior reviews of the application of solid-state NMR to biological macromolecules>1° peptides, and proteins.12 In these introductory sections we have in mind in particular those who are quite familiar with NMR experiments in solution, and 90 we try to emphasize both the similarities and the differences between the two states.