Stereospecific assignment of 1H resonances through chemical shift calculation and their use in structure determination by NMR

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Understanding of the factors which influence proton chemical shifts in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra of proteins has advanced steadily as the number of proteins, for which assignments in conjunction with high resolution structures have been obtained, has increased. Progress has been made in both the calculation of chemical shifts from given coordinates, both empirically for 1H (Williamson & Asakura J. Magn. Reson. (1991) 94, 557) and using ab initio approaches for calculation of 13C (De Dios et al. Science (1993) 260, 1491). Concomitantly Wishart et al. (J. Mol. Biol. (1992) 222, 311), using statistical methods have clarified the relationship between Hα chemical shift and regular secondary structure in proteins to a high degree of accuracy. We recently demonstrated the significant amount of structural information present in the Hα chemical shift through the use of chemical shift restrained molecular dynamics simulations (Harvey & van Gunsteren Techniques in Protein Chemistry IV (1993) 615, Academic Press). Here we apply a similar methodology to the stereospecific assignment of methylene and methyl proton resonances in proteins.Stereospecific assignment of such 1H resonances dramatically increases the degree of precision of ensembles of structures derived from NMR data. However, this is often a cumbersome process, requiring detailed analysis of large amounts of data. Furthermore, experimental considerations such as poor signal‐to‐noise ratios, spectral overlap and spin diffusion combine to make this process somewhat unreliable. We present calculations of the chemical shifts for the known structures of bovine pancreatic trypsin inhibitor (Mw 6.5 kDa) and the α‐amylase inhibitor tendamistat (Mw 8 kDa), for which stereospecific assignments and high resolution structures from both NMR and crystallographic studies are available. The methods described are also applied to the ensemble of structures obtained for protein S (Mw 19 kDa) for both structure evaluation, stereospecific assignment and subsequent refinement using chemical shift restrained molecular dynamics simulations. The structure of protein S has been determined by NMR but no x‐ray structure is available.