NMR spectroscopy with proteins based on observation of a small number of spins with outstanding spectral properties, which either may be present naturally or introduced by techniques such as site-specific isotope labeling, yielded biologically relevant information on human hemoglobin (M ϭ 65,000) as early as 1969 (1), and subsequently also for significantly larger systems such as Igs (2). In contrast, the use of NMR for de novo structure determination (3, 4) so far has been limited to relatively small molecular sizes, with the largest NMR structure below molecular weight 30,000. Although NMR in structural biology may, for practical reasons of coordinated use with x-ray crystallography (5), focus on smaller molecular sizes also in the future, considerable effort goes into attempts to extend the size limit to bigger molecules (for example, see refs. 6-8). Here we introduce transverse relaxation-optimized spectroscopy (TROSY) and present experimental data and theoretical considerations showing that this approach is capable of significantly reducing transverse relaxation rates and thus overcomes a key obstacle opposing solution NMR of larger molecules (7).At the high magnetic fields typically used for studies of proteins and nucleic acids, chemical shift anisotropy interaction (CSA) of 1 H, 15 N, and 13 C nuclei forms a significant source of relaxation in proteins and nucleic acids, in addition to dipole-dipole (DD) relaxation. This leads to increase of the overall transverse relaxation rates with increasing polarizing magnetic field, B 0 . Nonetheless, transverse relaxation of amide protons in larger proteins at high fields has been reduced successfully by complete or partial replacement of the nonlabile hydrogen atoms with deuterons and, for example, more than 90% of the 15 N, 13 C ␣ , and 1 H N chemical shifts thus were assigned in the polypeptide chains of a protein-DNA complex of size 64,000 (6). TROSY uses spectroscopic means to further reduce T 2 relaxation based on the fact that cross-correlated relaxation caused by DD and CSA interference gives rise to different relaxation rates of the individual multiplet components in a system of two coupled spins 1 ⁄2, I and S, such as the 15 N-1 H fragment of a peptide bond (9, 10). Theory shows that at 1 H frequencies near 1 GHz nearly complete cancellation of all transverse relaxation effects within a 15 N-1 H moiety can be achieved for one of the four multiplet components. TROSY observes exclusively this narrow component, for which the residual linewidth is then almost entirely because of DD interactions with remote hydrogen atoms in the protein. These can be efficiently suppressed by 2 H-labeling, so that in TROSY-type experiments the accessible molecular size for solution NMR studies no longer is primarily limited by T 2 relaxation.
TheoryWe consider a system of two scalar coupled spins 1 ⁄2, I and S, with a scalar coupling constant J IS , which is located in a protein molecule. T 2 relaxation of this spin system is dominated by the DD coupling of I and S a...