Achieving pure spin effects by artifact suppression in methyl adiabatic relaxation experiments

Recent methyl adiabatic relaxation dispersion experiments provide examination of conformational dynamics across a very wide timescale (10²-10⁵ s^-1) and, particularly, provide insight into the hydrophobic core of proteins and allosteric effects associated with modulators. The experiments require efficient decoupling of ¹H and ¹³C spin interactions, and some artifacts have been discovered, which are associated with the design of the proton decoupling scheme. The experimental data suggest that the original design is valid; however, pulse sequences with either no proton decoupling or proton decoupling with imperfect pulses can potentially exhibit complications in the experiments. Here, we demonstrate that pulse imperfections in the proton decoupling scheme can be dramatically alleviated by using a single composite π pulse and provide pure single-exponential relaxation data. It allows the opportunity to access high-quality methyl adiabatic relaxation dispersion data by removing the cross-correlation between dipole-dipole interaction and chemical shift anisotropy. The resulting high-quality data is illustrated with the binding of an allosteric modulator (G2BR) to the ubiquitin conjugating enzyme Ube2g2.