A simple algorithm to suppress diagonal peaks in high-resolution homonuclear chemical shift correlation NMR spectra

Previous experimental strategies aimed at completely suppressing diagonal peaks in NMR homonuclear correlation spectra often resulted in reduced sensitivity for cross peaks. In this work, we report a spectral shearing approach that transforms diagonal peaks along the diagonal axis of a homonuclear correlation spectrum into a zero-frequency line in the indirect dimension. This allows for effective extraction and substantial suppression of diagonal peaks using a recently proposed data processing algorithm based on quadrature-detected spin-echo diagonal peak suppression. Since the shearing process only rearranges the positions of cross peaks without affecting their intensities, the sensitivity of cross peaks is fully preserved while diagonal peaks are significantly reduced. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated using uniformly ¹³C,¹⁵N labeled α-synuclein amyloid fibrils and aquaporin Z membrane protein samples.