We seek to apply the power of 1H-detected ssNMR to growing numbers of areas in ssNMR. Due to the fact 1H’s gyromagnetic ratio is 4 times that of 13C, experiments detecting 1H are more sensitive and therefore faster. While 1H detection is increasing well developed in terms of chemical shift assignments, there is still a wide array of areas where it has not yet been deployed. In particular, we are interested on using ultrafast MAS with 1H detection to gain structural insight without deuterated samples. We are developing new pulse sequences to determine intermolecular distances both within a protein and intermolecularly, as well as study dynamics at many timescales. We have a MAS probe which can spin at 40 kHz and another which spins at 100 kHz is on the way.

In addition to 1H detected methods, we will use 31P detected methods. 31P is spin 1/2, 100% abundant, and relatively high gamma (17.235 MHz/T). It has good lineshape and sensetivity, a wide chemical shift range, and a large dipolar coupling range (~ 8 A). In addition, we expect to be able to filter out the lipid phosphate signal to obtain spectra with good signal-to-noise of specific phosphates we are interested in.