This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). Nuclear magnetic resonance reports on the immediate chemical environment surrounding the nucleus of an atom and provides a mechanism for determining the geometrical arrangement of atoms within molecules. Such chemical level details are critical for understanding molecular structure, function, and reactivity. Under this award, supported by the Experimental Physical Chemistry Program of the Chemistry Division, Prof. Leonard J. Mueller will conduct research at the University of California - Riverside centered on how to acquire, assign, and interpret nuclear magnetic resonance spectra in increasingly challenging systems. These experiments will be developed in the context of two applications that push the requirements for sensitivity and resolution beyond those routinely available. The first is correlation spectroscopy in solid-state proteins, where they will build up a novel set of multi-dimensional solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance experiments for establishing through-bond connectivity in macroscopically disordered solids using scalar coupling-driven correlation. These tools developed by the PI under this project will allow them to make chemical shift assignments of large enzyme systems and will provide chemical level detail on the substrate transformation in the active site. The impact of this work will be a better mechanistic understanding of enzyme function and the identification of potential targets for new antibiotics. The second is the development of 13C correlation spectroscopy at the natural abundance level. Here they will pursue a novel protocol optimized for sensitivity at natural abundance and apply these techniques to steroid systems with challenging relaxations rates and to structural questions in the materials chemistry of organic nanorods. The impact of this work will be to extend solid-state NMR correlation spectroscopy to the large number of academically and industrially important compounds that cannot easily be isotopically enriched.
This research project will involve undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral researchers and the broader impacts of this work are centered on increasing participation of underrepresented groups, enhancing infrastructure for research and education, and advancing discovery and understanding while promoting teaching, training and learning. These include the expansion of an existing summer undergraduate research program between the Joint Sciences Department of the Claremont Colleges (a PUI) and the UCR Chemistry Department and an international collaboration for training graduate students. As well, the PI will collaborate with industrial partners to release pulse program codes developed under this grant, enabling the quick dissemination of knowledge and the development of additional applications.
