Experimentation with 15N enriched ubiquitin

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is of fundamental importance in the advancement of the life sciences. Students obtaining chemistry degrees are increasingly likely to enter the life sciences and to intersect with the application of NMR to the study of biological systems. Increased undergraduate laboratory instruction in biological NMR is needed to help bridge the gap to the sophisticated uses of NMR in the life sciences in graduate and industry settings. We present several biomolecular NMR experiments using human ubiquitin for upper level chemistry coursework. We review prior work and describe extensions, such as temperature variation, to illustrate protein dynamics in more detail. We exploit direct 15 N detection of the NMR signal to achieve very high quality spectra on limited instrumentation and using a commercially available sample.