Using chemical shifts to determine structural changes in proteins upon complex formation.

Methods for determining protein structures using only chemical shift information are progressively becoming more accurate and reliable. A major problem, however, in the use of chemical shifts for the determination of the structures of protein complexes is that the changes in the chemical shifts upon binding tend to be rather limited and indeed often smaller than the standard errors made in the predictions of chemical shifts corresponding to given structures. We present a procedure that, despite this problem, enables one to use of chemical shifts to determine accurately the conformational changes that take place upon complex formation.