Deuteration of proteins boosted by cell lysates: High-resolution amide and Ha magic-angle-spinning (MAS) NMR without the reprotonation bottleneck

Amide-proton-detected magic-angle-spinning NMR of deuterated proteins has become a main technique in NMR-based structural biology. In standard deuteration protocols that rely on D2O-based culture media, non-exchangeable amide sites remain deuterated, making these sites unobservable. Here we demonstrate that proteins produced with a H2O-based culture medium doped with deuterated cell lysate allow scientists to overcome this “reprotonation bottleneck” while retaining a high level of deuteration (ca. 80 %) and narrow linewidths. We quantified coherence lifetimes of several proteins prepared with this labeling pattern over a range of magic-angle-spinning (MAS) frequencies (40–100 kHz). We demonstrate that under commonly used conditions (50–60 kHz MAS), the amide 1H linewidths with our labeling approach are comparable to those of perdeuterated proteins and better than those of protonated samples at 100 kHz. For three proteins in the 33–50 kDa size range, many previously unobserved amides become visible. We report how to prepare the deuterated cell lysate for our approach from fractions of perdeuterated cultures which are usually discarded, and we show that such media can be used identically to commercial media. The residual protonation of Hα sites allows for well-resolved Hα-detected spectra and Hα resonance assignment, exemplified by the de novo assignment of 168 Hα sites in a 39 kDa protein. The approach based on this H2O/cell-lysate deuteration and MAS frequencies compatible with 1.3 or 1.9 mm rotors presents a strong sensitivity benefit over 0.7 mm 100 kHz MAS experiments.