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Updated: May 29, 2026

Atomic Scale Structural Studies of Macromolecular Assemblies by Solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy
Published on: September 17, 2017
Calculation of chemical shift anisotropy in proteins
1Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, BioMaPS Institute, Rutgers University, Piscataway, NJ 08854, USA.
None:
Individual peptide groups in proteins must exhibit some variation in the chemical shift anisotropy (CSA) of their constituent atoms, but not much is known about the extent or origins of this dispersion. Direct spectroscopic measurement of CSA remains technically challenging, and theoretical methods can help to overcome these limitations by estimating shielding tensors for arbitrary structures. Here we use an automated fragmentation quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics (AF-QM/MM) approach to compute (15)N, (13)C' and (1)H chemical shift tensors for human ubiquitin and the GB1 and GB3 fragments of staphylococcal protein G. The average and range of variation of the anisotropies is in good agreement with experimental estimates from solid-state NMR, and the variation among residues is somewhat smaller than that estimated from solution-state measurements. Hydrogen-bond effects account for much of the variation, both between helix and sheet regions, and within elements of secondary structure, but other effects (including variations in torsion angles) may play a role as well.
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