Applications of NMR in drug discovery

In the half-century since its discovery, nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) has become the single most powerful form of spectroscopy in both chemistry and structural biology. The dramatic technical advances over the past 10-15 years, which continue apace, have markedly increased the range of applications for NMR in the study of protein-ligand interactions. These form the basis for its most exciting uses in the drug discovery process, which range from the simple identification of whether a compound (or a component of a mixture) binds to a given protein, through to the determination of the full three-dimensional structure of the complex, with all the information this yields for structure-based drug design.