An efficient method for secondary structure determination in polypeptides by NMR

摘要

Recent advancements in NMR are having a significant impact in structural biology. During the last two decades, NMR has become a powerful tool in the 3D structure determination of proteins. A prelude to such structure determination is the sequence-specific resonance assignments and characterization of various short ordered stretches, which are called secondary structural elements. In this communication, we propose an alternative and efficient method for the determination of secondary structures in proteins. We strongly believe that Delta C'-Delta C-beta (the difference in the deviations between the observed and random coil chemical shift values of C' and C-beta spins) provides accurate signatures of various secondary structural elements present in any given protein, whether it is predominantly a-helical or beta-sheet in its content.