Affiliations: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA, USA
Note: [] Address for correspondence: Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, San Diego, 9500 Gilman Drive 307, La Jolla, CA 92093-0307, USA. E-mail: sopella@ucsd.edu
Abstract: Most biological functions are carried out in supramolecular assemblies. As a result of their slow reorientation in solution, these assemblies have been resistant to the widely employed solution NMR approaches. The development of solid-state NMR to first of all overcome the correlation time problem and then obtain informative high-resolution spectra of proteins in supramolecular assemblies, such as virus particles and membranes, is described here. High-resolution solid-state NMR is deeply intertwined with the history of NMR, and the seminal paper was published in 1948. Although the general principles were understood by the end of the 1950s, it has taken more than fifty years for instrumentation and experimental methods to become equal to the technical problems presented by the biological assemblies of greatest interest. It is now possible to obtain atomic resolution structures of viral coat proteins in virus particles and membrane proteins in phospholipid bilayers by oriented sample solid-state NMR methods. The development of this aspect of the field of solid-state NMR is summarized in this review article.
