Andy Nieuwkoop

Baseball leaked over the football even.

Measuring long-range contacts in a fully protonated protein at 105 kHz magic angle spinning - Journal of Biomolecular NMR The use of 1H detection, made possible by very fast magic-angle spinning (MAS), has revolutionized the field of biomolecular solid-state NMR. In the past, 1H detection was often paired with deuteration schemes to achieve the highest possible resolution needed for protein structural characterization. However, with modern probes capable of MAS rates over 100 kHz, deuteration is no longer required, resulting in a need to measure long-range distances in fully protonated systems. In this study, we evaluate the potential of two 3D pulse sequences, (H)NCOH and (H)NCAH, to measure long-range C-H correlations in a fully protonated protein sample at a MAS rate of 105 kHz. Our results show that the (H)NCOH spectrum contains multiple sequential and structurally relevant long-range CO–H contacts for each residue, capturing HN contacts up to 6 Å despite transfers to side chain protons. Conversely, the (H)NCAH spectrum yields fewer Cα-HN correlations, with those present mostly from intraresidue aliphatic proton contacts. Therefore, in protonated proteins, the extensive 1H network leads to dipolar truncation in the Cα-H experiment, while the CO–H correlations observed are comparable to those in deuterated samples. These findings highlight the feasibility of conducting distance measurements based on long-range cross polarization, on more accessible and affordable samples, expanding the scope of proton detection for systems where deuteration and back-exchange are not possible.

Happy to report Zainab’s paper on measuring distances at very fast MAS is live! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Measurement of phospholipid lateral diffusion at high pressure by in situ magic-angle spinning NMR spectroscopy - Communications Chemistry Despite the significance of high pressure in the story of life on Earth, our current understanding of biochemistry at high pressure is limited, primarily due to technological challenges associated wit...

Next paper on lipid dynamics. This time measuring diffusion under pressure using 31P CODEX. Great work from Tom in collaboration with the Vetriani lab here at Rutgers.

www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Thank you. Working to see what we can do without labels is a real focus of the program.

Effects of Ca2+ on the Structure and Dynamics of PIP3 in Model Membranes Containing PC and PS Phosphatidylinositol phosphates (PIPs) are a family of seven different eukaryotic membrane lipids that have a large role in cell viability, despite their minor concentration in eukaryotic cellular mem...

pubs.acs.org/doi/full/10....

Celebrating the new start on blue sky with a paper on lipid dynamics!