Monitoring Conformational Changes in an Enzyme Conversion Inhibitor Using Pure Shift Exchange NMR Spectroscopy

We report the acquisition of 2D NMR EXSY spectra with ultrahigh resolution, which allows for probing the slow conformational exchange process in a pharmaceutical compound. The resolution enhancement is achieved by implementing interferogram based PSYCHE homonuclear decoupling to generate a pure shift proton spectrum along the direct domain of the resulting data. The performance of this pure shift EXSY pulse sequence is compared to the standard experiment recorded under identical conditions. It is found that although being less sensitive and requiring a longer acquisition time, the quality of pure shift spectra allows for extracting exchange rates values that are coherent with the ones determined by standard approach, on a temperature range that demonstrates the robustness of the chosen homonuclear decoupling method. The resolution enhancement provided by the simplification of proton line shape allows for probing a higher number of proton sites whose analysis would have been biased using a standard method. These results open the way to a thorough and accurate study of chemical exchange processes based on a multi-site analysis of 2D pure shift EXSY spectra.