Post-Acquisition Filtering: Applications to In-cell NMR (2010)

Undergraduates: Alexander Krois, Andrew Miklos Dr. Marc ter Horst

Faculty Advisor: Gary Pielak
Department: Chemistry

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Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a powerful tool for studying the structure, stability, and dynamics of biopolymers; yet most research on biologically relevant compounds is performed in vitro, with a limited relevance to normal biology. In-cell NMR provides a tool to study proteins in a biologically relevant setting; yet the method has several weaknesses, including the unavoidable detection of non-target molecules (metabolites, other cellular biopolymers, etc.), which can create crowded spectra with undesired signals overlapping with the signals of interest. Frequently these undesired peaks will be of significant size, decreasing sensitivity and making useful information harder to obtain. If these undesired signals could be removed immediately after the signals exit the spectrometer but before they are digitized the electronic gain can be increased, which would increase the sensitivity. Post-acquisition filtering involves peak identification, peak fitting, and ultimately removal of the undesired peaks from the original spectrum. My project demonstrated the feasibility of the removal method. Using a test sample comprised of purified proteins with added cell extracts, specific metabolite peaks were identified, fitted, and removed.