Nuclear magnetic resonance relaxation dispersion (rd) experiments provide kinetics and thermodynamics information of molecules undergoing conformational exchange. Rd experiments often use a Carr-Purcell-Meiboom-Gill (CPMG) pulse train equally separated by a spin-state selective inversion element (U-element). Even with measurement parameters carefully set, however, parts of 1H–15N correlations sometimes exhibit large artifacts that may hamper the subsequent analyses. We analyzed such artifacts with a combination of NMR measurements and simulation. We found that particularly the lowest CPMG frequency (νcpmg) can also introduce large artifacts into amide 1H–15N and aromatic 1H–13C correlations whose 15N/13C resonances are very close to the carrier frequencies. The simulation showed that the off-resonance effects and miscalibration of the CPMG π pulses generate artifact maxima at resonance offsets of even and odd multiples of νcpmg, respectively. We demonstrate that a method once introduced into the rd experiments for molecules having residual dipolar coupling significantly reduces artifacts. In the method the 15N/13C π pulse phase in the U-element is chosen between x and y. We show that the correctly adjusted sequence is tolerant to miscalibration of the CPMG π pulse power as large as ±10% for most amide 15N and aromatic 13C resonances of proteins.
Complexity of Protein Energy Landscapes Studied by Solution NMR Relaxation Dispersion Experiments