Paramagnetic labelling of proteins and oligonucleotides for NMR

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a very valuable analytical technique for researchers. It has been used for more than 50 years as an analytical tool. F. Bloch and E. Purcell formulated NMR in 1946 and won the 1952 Nobel Prize in Physics  for their work. Biological macromolecules such as proteins, nucleic acids, lipids, and organic molecules including pharmaceutical compounds, can be studied using this versatile tool that exploits the magnetic properties of certain nuclei.
The...

The number of nuclear spins aligned in the lower energy state is slightly greater than those in the higher energy state. In the presence of an external magnetic field, as the spins precess at the Larmor frequency, the excess population results in a net magnetization oriented along the z axis. When a pulse or a short burst of radio waves at the Larmor frequency is applied along the x axis, the coupling of frequencies causes resonance and flips the nuclear spins of the excess population from the...

A proteome is the entire set of proteins that a cell type produces. We can study proteomes using the knowledge of genomes because genes code for mRNAs, and the mRNAs encode proteins. Although mRNA analysis is a step in the right direction, not all mRNAs are translated into proteins.
Proteomics is the study of proteomes' function. It involves the large-scale systematic study of the proteome to denote the protein complement expressed by a genome. Scientist Mark Wilkins coined the term proteomics...

DNA probes are fragments of DNA labeled with a reporter tag to enable their detection or purification. The resulting labeled DNA probes can then hybridize to target nucleic acid sequences through complementary base-pairing, and may be used to recover or identify these regions.
Radioisotopes, fluorophores, or small molecule binding partners like biotin or digoxigenin, are the most widely used reporter tags for labeling DNA probes. These labels can be attached to the probe DNA molecule via...

The Pople nomenclature system classifies spin systems based on the difference between their chemical shifts. Coupled spins are denoted by capital letters with subscripts indicating the number of equivalent nuclei. When the coupled nuclei have well-separated chemical shifts, they are assigned letters that are far apart in the alphabet, such as A and X. When the difference in chemical shifts is small, coupled nuclei are named using adjacent letters of the alphabet (AB, MN, or XY).
A proton...

Protons bonded to heteroatoms such as nitrogen and oxygen exhibit a range of chemical shift values. This is due to the varying degree of hydrogen bonding between the proton and the heteroatom in other molecules. The extent of hydrogen bonding affects the electron density around the proton, thereby giving different chemical shift values for the protons in the proton NMR spectrum.
The –OH proton in alcohols typically appears in the range of δ 2 to 5 ppm but can vary depending on the specific...