Open Access Article
Ibraheem M.
Haies
ab,
James A.
Jarvis
c,
Lynda J.
Brown
a,
Ilya
Kuprov
a,
Philip T. F.
Williamson
c and
Marina
Carravetta
*a
aSchool of Chemistry, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Southampton, UK. E-mail: m.carravetta@soton.ac.uk
bDepartment of Chemistry, College of Science, University of Mosul, Mosul, Iraq
cCentre for Biological Sciences, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ, Southampton, UK
First published on 7th August 2015
Solid-state NMR transitions involving outer energy levels of the spin-1 14N nucleus are immune, to first order in perturbation theory, to the broadening caused by the nuclear quadrupole interaction. The corresponding overtone spectra, when acquired in conjunction with magic-angle sample spinning, result in lines, which are just a few kHz wide, permitting the direct detection of nitrogen compounds without the need for labeling. Despite the success of this technique, “overtone” resonances are still broadened due to indirect, second order effects arising from the large quadrupolar interaction. Here we demonstrate that another order of magnitude in spectral resolution may be gained by using double rotation. This brings the width of the 14N solid-state NMR lines much closer to the region commonly associated with high-resolution solid-state NMR spectroscopy of 15N and demonstrates the improvements in resolution that may be possible through the development of pulsed methodologies to suppress these second order effects.
One of the main challenges for the routine application of 14N solid state NMR is resolution. In this communication we address this issue and demonstrate experimentally that, when applied to 14N overtone NMR, DOR can bring about a significant further reduction in line width and take the NMR lines into the sub-kHz domain more commonly associated with NMR of spin-1/2 nuclei. Information on the size of the quadrupolar interaction is still present in the DOR spectra as the peak position is determined by a combination of the chemical shift and the second order isotropic quadrupolar shift. A further challenge to tackle with methods for sensitivity enhancement is already being developed, including polarization transfer,24 DNP,20 optimal control theory34 and other instrumental improvements.
We also report progress with another long-standing issue associated with both DOR and overtone spectroscopy – the mathematical complexity of its numerical treatment. This paper uses the Fokker–Planck formalism35,36 (recently implemented in Spinach37). Its most attractive feature is that the DOR evolution operator is time-independent and the rotor coordinates, once discretized, are in a direct product relationship with the spin degrees of freedom.
The DOR measurements used a wide-bore double resonance DOR probe, with diameters of 9.3 mm for the outer rotor (at magic angle) and 3.4 mm for the inner rotor (at 30.56°), respectively. Both rotors rotate in a clockwise direction. The power level was calibrated to give an overtone nutation frequency of ωOTnut/2π = 21 kHz for the 14N overtone using the 17O signal from the H2O sample at 115.262 MHz and no 1H decoupling was used under DOR.
MAS measurements were performed using a 3.2-mm-wide-bore triple resonance probe and a 3.2 mm zirconium oxide rotor, which rotates in the anticlockwise direction. For MAS, SPINAL64 decoupling at ωHnut/2π = 89 kHz was used throughout, while the overtone nutation frequency was set to ωOTnut/2π = 70 kHz and calibrated on water as above.
A clear solution was prepared by sonication of L-valine-d8 (250 mg, 2 mmol) in D2O (5 mL). Acetic anhydride-d6 (433 mg, 4 mmol, 380 µL) was added at 0 min, 2 min and 4 min (127 µL at each interval). The reaction (Scheme 1) was sonicated for a further 5 min and then the solvent was removed in vacuo. The white residue was dissolved in methanol (20 mL) and the solution was filtered to remove traces of unreacted starting material. The filtrate was evaporated in vacuo and the residue was recrystallised twice from D2O (2 × 1 mL) to give N-(acetyl-d3)valine-d10 as a white solid (280 mg, 1.63 mmol, 82%). Further details of the characterization of this material are provided in the ESI.†
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| Scheme 1 Preparation of NAV.39 | ||
![]() | (1) |
(φO, φI, t) is the state vector and
is the spin Hamiltonian commutation superoperator:![]() | (2) |
If the spatial basis is chosen to be complex exponentials of the rotor angles, this formalism would reduce35 to nested Floquet theory.42,43eqn (1) does, however, also permit a more direct numerical approach – exact matrix representations exist for the derivative operators on any periodic grid.44 At the matrix level, this leads to remarkably simple relations:
![]() | (3) |
are identity superoperators of indicated dimensions,
are Fourier spectral differentiation matrices44 of indicated dimensions, the vector ρ(t) is obtained by stacking the state vector
(φ(n)O, φ(k)I, t) vertically in the order of increasing index of the inner rotor grid points, followed by the increasing index of the outer rotor grid points, and the block-diagonal matrix H0 is obtained by concatenating individual grid point Hamiltonians
in the same order as the state vectors.
From the practical programming perspective, the entire procedure is implemented and extensively annotated in the double rotation module of Spinach.37 At the cost of increasing the matrix dimensions, the presence of the double rotation no longer troubles the end user – DOR dynamics operators are now just another static term in the background Hamiltonian F0:
| F(t) = F0 + F1(t), F0 = H0 + DI + DO, F1(t) = H1(t) | (4) |
From this point onwards, the problem is identical to the simulation of a pulse-acquire experiment with a soft pulse, with the additional complication that the frequency of the pulse is twice the Larmor frequency of the spin – we are pulsing and detecting the overtone transition. The methods used to perform such simulations in reasonable time are described in our previous paper24 and implemented in Spinach.37 Because the number of spinning sidebands in overtone spectra is small and the resulting signals are narrow, five to seven grid points for the discretization of the phase of each rotor and a rank 5 Lebedev spherical averaging grid (parallel evaluation) were in practice found to be sufficient. When the calculation is parallelized with respect to the spherical averaging grid, the simulation shown in Fig. 1 takes a few minutes on a contemporary quad-core desktop workstation. All simulations for DOR and MAS experiments were performed using a single 14N spin and neglecting the effects of protons and deuterons, using parameters summarised in Table 1. Hence the simulated DOR lineshapes are unaffected by the residual dipolar interactions with other neighbouring nuclei.
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Fig. 1 DOR simulation and experiments for the 14N overtone transition of glycine and NAV. Simulations were obtained using one 14N spin, parameters from Table 1 and ideal pulses. Experiments were recorded at ωOTnut/2π = 21 kHz without decoupling. The numbers above the peaks are indices for spinning sidebands of the outer and inner rotors, respectively. (A) Simulation for NAV using the outer rotor frequency of 1.45 kHz and the inner rotor frequency of 7.6 kHz; (B) simulation for glycine using the outer rotor frequency of 1.425 kHz and the inner rotor frequency of 6.95 kHz; (C) the experimental spectra of the (−2, −2) spinning sideband of deuterated NAV acquired with 550 000 scans using 300 µs pulse width; and (D and E) experimental spectra of the (−2, −2) and (−2, −1) spinning sidebands of deuterated glycine respectively, acquired with 40 000 scans using 800 µs pulse width. The ellipsoid plots indicate the principal directions and the absolute values of the corresponding eigenvalues for the 14N NQI tensors. | ||
Experimental spectra (Fig. 1, insets) of deuterated glycine-d3 and NAV-d13 were acquired at 850 MHz on a Bruker Avance III spectrometer equipped with a DOR probe where both spinners rotate in a clockwise direction. Due to the limited excitation bandwidth, it is not possible to record the overall spectrum at once and only individual sidebands can be recorded. The overtone transition is forbidden in the Zeeman basis and overtone excitation is quite ineffective with the low power levels provided by the DOR probe, leading to the long pulse length and narrow bandwidth. Nutation curves for the (−2, −2) spinning sidebands of both compounds are given in Fig. S1 (ESI†). Glycine requires longer pulses than NAV due to a smaller quadrupole coupling constant. As seen in Fig. 1, experimental results and simulation show good agreement for both the resonance position and relative peak intensity. The most intense signal is at the (−2, −2) spinning sideband. Attempts were also made to acquire other DOR spinning sidebands for glycine (8000 scans) but there was no clear evidence of the signal (Fig. S2, ESI†). The extent of the line-narrowing effect of DOR on overtone NMR data may be appreciated from Fig. 2 and 3. Note that simulations are consistently much narrower than the experimental data. The larger experimental line width is attributed to spinning frequency instabilities and dipolar couplings to other nuclei. Spinning speed variations of the DOR rotors were of the order of ±25 Hz, and since we are observing not the center-band but sidebands of the overtone signal, unstable spinning will significantly broaden the resonances. Moreover, the DOR experiments were run at moderate spinning frequencies and without any decoupling, hence dipolar coupling to deuterium and protons is unlikely to be fully averaged out. Such an extended spin system is too complex for accurate numerical simulation. Simulations of DOR in Fig. 2 and 3 are sharp as they do not suffer from these effects, and assumed a single nitrogen atom, but the full quadrupolar Hamiltonian (not just first and second order terms) is considered here. The Spinach input file which generated Fig. 1 for glycine is included in the ESI† as an example.
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Fig. 2 Line width comparison for DOR and MAS overtone powder spectra of glycine. (A) DOR experiment for the (−2, −2) sideband of deuterated glycine, 40 000 scans, no decoupling; and (B) DOR experiment for the (−2, −1) sideband of deuterated glycine, 40 000 scans, no decoupling; DOR conditions are specified in the Fig. 1 caption. (C) MAS experiment for the +2 spinning sideband of glycine, 1024 scans, SPINAL64 decoupling, using ωOTnut/2π = 70 kHz and a 275 µs excitation pulse with ωr/2π = 19.84 kHz. (D–F) Simulations of the data in A–C were performed using one 14N spin, the parameters given in Table 1, and using durations and amplitudes matching the experimental data. | ||
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Fig. 3 Line width comparison for DOR and MAS overtone powder spectra of NAV. (A) DOR experiment data for the (−2, −2) spinning sideband of deuterated NAV, 550 000 scans, no decoupling. DOR conditions are specified in the Fig. 1 caption. (B) MAS experiment at the +2 spinning sideband of NAV, 40 000 scans, SPINAL64 decoupling, using ωOTnut/2π = 70 kHz and a 275 µs excitation pulse with ωr/2π = 19.84 kHz; and (C) and (D) are the corresponding simulations, using one 14N spin, the parameters given in Table 1, and using durations and amplitudes matching the experimental data. Note that the two features on the side of the main peak in (A) and (C) are spinning sidebands of the outer rotor. | ||
For glycine, both the experimental and the simulated DOR NMR lines at (−2, −1) and (−2, −2) sidebands are about three times narrower than the corresponding MAS lines (Fig. 2). The experimental width of the (−2, −2) sideband under DOR is 280 Hz, while the width of the +2 spinning sideband under MAS is about 900 Hz (Fig. 2). It is clear from Fig. 3 that the (−2, −2) DOR sideband is much sharper than the +2 MAS sideband for NAV also: the 3.57 kHz line width under MAS is reduced to only 0.42 kHz under DOR, an improvement by almost an order of magnitude.
The reduction in line width observed under DOR indicates that the residual width apparent in the MAS 14N overtone spectra does indeed arise from the second order quadrupolar terms in the Hamiltonian, removed in the DOR experiment. Importantly, none of that narrowing can be attributed to the narrow bandwidth of the very long overtone pulses under DOR, nor to the deuteration in the sample. This is because identical reduction in the line width is seen in the simulations in which the dipolar interactions with the surrounding atoms are switched off and ideal, very strong pulses are used (Fig. 1). The large number of scans required to record the DOR data arises from the reduced sample volume and reduced excitation efficiency compared to the MAS experiments, where stronger RF pulses are possible.16
The routine application of DOR presents a number of technical challenges both in terms of sensitivity and RF performance. However pulsed methods for the suppression of 2nd order quadrupolar broadening effects in the indirect dimension (MQMAS and STMAS) have existed for half-integer spins for some time and can be implemented using standard solid-state NMR probes.26–29 Our findings highlight that for integer spin nuclei, such as the 14N case explored herein, similar averaging of the second order quadrupolar broadening is feasible and the development of pulsed methods will enable the routine realization of the significant resolution enhancements we have observed.
Footnote |
| † Electronic supplementary information (ESI) available. See DOI: 10.1039/c5cp03266k |
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