¹³C Selective Polarization and Spin Diffusion in a Lipid Bilayer-Bound Polypeptide by Solid-State NMR

While ¹⁵N solid-state NMR has proven to be very advantageous for the development of structural biological methods, ¹³C spectroscopy has increased sensitivity and spectral dispersion. However, large natural abundance signals and homonuclear dipolar interactions pose significant problems. Here we have used a pair of ¹³C-labeled sites in a lipid-solubilized polypeptide to show the selective polarization can be used in combination with spin diffusion to achieve simplified spectra. Both unoriented and oriented samples have been used, with the latter providing a well-resolved homonuclear dipolar splitting.