Aromatic spectral editing techniques for magic-angle-spinning solid-state NMR spectroscopy of uniformly 13C-labeled proteins

The four aromatic amino acids in proteins, namely histidine, phenylalanine, tyrosine, and tryptophan, have strongly overlapping C-13 chemical shift ranges between 100 and 160 ppm, and have so far been largely neglected in solid-state NMR determination of protein structures. Yet aromatic residues play important roles in biology through pi-pi and cation-pi interactions. To better resolve and assign aromatic residues' C-13 signals in magic-angle-spinning (MAS) solid-state NMR spectra, we introduce two spectral editing techniques. The first method uses gated H-1 decoupling in a proton-driven spin-diffusion (PDSD) experiment to remove all protonated C-13 signals and retain only non-protonated carbon signals in the aromatic region of the C-13 spectra. The second technique uses chemical shift filters and H-1-C-13 dipolar dephasing to selectively detect the C alpha, C beta and CO cross peaks of aromatic residues while suppressing the signals of all aliphatic residues. We demonstrate these two techniques on amino acids, a model peptide, and the microcrystalline protein GB1, and show that they significantly simplify the 2D NMR spectra and both reveal and permit the ready assignment of the aromatic residues' signals. (C) 2015 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.