Chemical nuclease, types

Figure 12.12a gives a good illustration of the need for going to a third dimension to facilitate the interpretation of a crowded 2D spectrum. The NOESY spectrum of a uniformly 15N-enriched protein, staphylococcal nuclease, has so many cross peaks that interpretation is virtually impossible. However, it is possible to use, 5N chemical shifts to edit this spectrum, as indicated in Fig. 12.121) and c in a three-dimensional experiment. With the 15N enrichment, NOESY can be combined with a heteronuclear correlation experiment, in this case HMQC, but HSQC could also be used. A 3D pulse sequence can be obtained from two separate 2D experiments by deleting the detection period of one experiment and the preparation period of the other to obtain two evolution periods (q and t2) and one detection period (f3). In principle, the two 2D components can be placed in either order. For the NOESY-HMQC experiment, either order works well, but in some instances coherence transfer proceeds more efficiendy with a particular arrangement of the component experiments. We look first at the NOESY-HMQC sequence, for which a pulse sequence is given in Fig. 12.13. The three types of spins are designated I and S (as usual), both of which are H in the current example, and T, which is 15N in this case.

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