Effects of radiation damping for biomolecular NMR experiments in solution: a hemisphere concept for water suppression

Abundant solvent nuclear spins, such as water protons in aqueous solution, cause radiation damping in NMR experiments. It is important to know how the effect of radiation damping appears in high-resolution protein NMR because macromolecular studies always require very high magnetic field strengths with a highly sensitive NMR probe that can easily cause radiation damping. Here, we show the behavior of water magnetization after a pulsed-field gradient (PFG) using nutation experiments at 900 MHz with a cryogenic probe: when water magnetization is located in the upper hemisphere (having +Z component, parallel to the external magnetic field), dephasing of the magnetization by a PFG effectively suppresses residual water magnetization in the transverse plane. In contrast, when magnetization is located in the lower hemisphere (having -Z component), the small residual transverse component remaining after a PFG is still sufficient to induce radiation damping. Based on this observation, we designed ¹H-¹⁵N HSQC experiments in which water magnetization is maintained in the upper hemisphere, but not necessarily along Z, and compared them with the conventional experiments, in which water magnetization is inverted during the t₁ period. The result demonstrates moderate gain of signal-to-noise ratio, 0-28%. Designing the experiments such that water magnetization is maintained in the upper hemisphere allows shorter pulses to be used compared to the complete water flip-back and, thereby, is useful as a building block of protein NMR pulse programs in solution.