Jelinski, Lynn

An elegant NMR experiment by the group of Lynn Jelinski at Cornell University has established that at least part of the microcrystals is built up from the polyalanine repeats in the protein chains. These experiments, which were made on C-enriched proteins produced by feeding the spiders C-labeled alanine, showed that there were two populations of alanine side chains, one ordered and oriented perpendicular to the fiber axis and a second less ordered. Jelinski s interpretation is that parts of the polyalanine sequences are incorporated as p strands in the microcrystals with an orientation parallel to the fiber axis. Whether or not the Gly-Gly-X repeats also form P strands in the microcrystals remains an open question. 

It is well known that nmr is a powerful means for the study of the dynamics of polymer chains both in solution and in the solid state. The relaxation of 13C nuclei has been extensively employed for this purpose in this and other laboratories. I illustrate here a dilferent and particularly intriguing approach which as yet has seen only very limited application to synthetic polymers. This is deuterium quadrupolar echo spectroscopy, as employed in our laboratory by Dr. Lynn Jelinski and her collaborators (20). The presence of the nuclear electric quadrupole lifts the degeneracy of the two deuterium Zeeman transitions, and in the solid state produces a very broad (ca 200 kHz) powder pattern of transitions which can be interpreted to yield very specific motional information for those carbons labelled with deuterium. In Figure 7 are shown spectra of poly (butylene terephthalate) deuterated on the central carbons of the aliphatic chains ... 

LYNN W. JELINSKI, JOSEPH J. DUMAIS, F. C. SCHILLING, and F. A. BOVEY Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, NJ 07974... 

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See also in sourсe #XX -- [ ]

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