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Updated: Jun 21, 2026

NMR 15N Relaxation Experiments for the Investigation of Picosecond to Nanoseconds Structural Dynamics of Proteins
Published on: November 1, 2024
Impact of selective excitation on carbon longitudinal relaxation: Towards fast solid-state NMR techniques
Mathilde Giffard1, Michel Bardet, Beate Bersch
1Laboratoire de Chimie Inorganique et Biologique (UMR-E3 CEA/UJF, FRE 3200 CEA/CNRS), INAC, CEA, F-38054 Grenoble, France.
Abstract:
The effect of selective pulses on the apparent carbon longitudinal relaxation is investigated in three fully (13)C-labeled systems, histidine as a model system and two proteins MerP and YajG. It is shown that the longitudinal relaxation of a selectively excited carbon spin is greatly enhanced, mainly because of fast spin-diffusion. This relaxation enhancement allows reducing the time necessary for polarization recovery between two experiments. This effect can be exploited either to improve the sensitivity of NMR experiments or to reduce the experimental time. Using selective carbon excitation combined with fast pulsing on fully (13)C-labeled proteins, a sensitivity improvement of 20-45% over standard cross-polarization methods is predicted from the measured relaxation times.
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