Protein φ and ψ dihedral restraints determined from multidimensional hypersurface correlations of backbone chemical shifts and their use in the determination of protein tertiary structures

The chemical shifts of the backbone atoms of proteins can be used to obtainrestraints that can be incorporated into structure determination methods. Eachchemical shift can be used to define a restraint and these restraints can besimultaneously used to define the local, secondary structure features. Theglobal fold can be determined by a combined use of the chemical shift basedrestraints along with the long-range information present in the NOEs ofpartially deuterated proteins or the amide–amide NOEs but not from suchlimited NOE data sets alone. This approach has been demonstrated to be capableof determining the overall folding pattern of four proteins. This suggeststhat solution-state NMR methods can be extended to the structure determinationof larger proteins by using the information present in the chemical shifts ofthe backbone atoms along with the data that can be obtained on a small numberof labeled forms.