Amino-acid selective experiments on uniformly 13C and 15N labeled proteins by MAS NMR: Filtering of lysines and arginines

Amino-acid selective magic-angle spinning (MAS) NMR experiments can aid the assignment of ambiguous cross-peaks in crowded spectra of solid proteins. In particular for larger proteins, data analysis can be hindered by severe resonance overlap. In such cases, filtering techniques may provide a good alternative to site-specific spin-labeling to obtain unambiguous assignments that can serve as starting points in the assignment procedure. In this paper we present a simple pulse sequence that allows selective excitation of arginine and lysine residues. To achieve this, we make use of a combination of specific cross-polarization for selective excitation [M. Baldus, A.T. Petkova, J. Herzfeld, R.G. Griffin, Cross polarization in the tilted frame: assignment and spectral simplification in heteronuclear spin systems, Mol. Phys. 95 (1998) 1197-1207.] and spin diffusion for transfer along the amino-acid side-chain. The selectivity of the filter is demonstrated with the excitation of lysine and arginine side-chain resonances in a uniformly 13C and 15N labeled protein preparation of the α-spectrin SH3 domain. It is shown that the filter can be applied as a building block in a 13C-13C lysine-only correlation experiment.