Heteronuclear relayed E.COSY revisited: determination of 3J(H(alpha),C(gamma)) couplings in Asx and aromatic residues in proteins.

Constant-time 3D heteronuclear relayed E.COSY [Schmidt et al. (1996) J. Biomol. NMR, 7, 142-152], as based on generic 2D small-flip-angle HMQC-COSY [Schmidt et al. (1995) J. Biomol. NMR, 6, 95-105], has been modified to allow for quantitative determination of heteronuclear three-bond 3J(H(alpha),C(gamma)) couplings. The method is applicable to amino acid spin topologies with carbons in the gamma position which lack attached protons, i.e. to asparagine, aspartate, and aromatic residues in uniformly 13C-enriched proteins. The pulse sequence critically exploits heteronuclear triple-quantum coherence (HTQC) of CH2 moieties involving geminal H(beta) proton pairs, taking advantage of improved multiple-quantum relaxation properties, at the same time avoiding scalar couplings between those spins involved in multiple-quantum coherence, thus yielding E.COSY-type multiplets with a splitting structure that is simpler than with the original scheme. Numerical least-squares 2D line-shape simulation is used to extract 3J(H(alpha),C(gamma)) coupling constants which are of relevance to side-chain chi1 dihedral-angle conformations in polypeptides. Methods are demonstrated with recombinant 15N,13C-enriched ribonuclease T1 and Desulfovibrio vulgaris flavodoxin with bound oxidized FMN.