Nuclear Magnetic Resonance: A Tool for Structural Biology

Nuclear magnetic resonance: a tool for structural biologyNuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a standard tool in chemistry, essentially used to determine molecular structure. Since the middle of the 80's, NMR has been also widely used to study biological macromolecules. Huge progresses, technological, methodological and on the sample preparation field, has allowed NMR to answer very diverse questions concerning the spatial conformation of the macromolecules, their dynamic and movements at each timescale and their interactions in stable or transient complexes. The use of NMR has been decisive in many cases (the study of amyloid proteins or transient complexes for example) and has favored the emergence of new concepts (the role of the dynamics and the importance of the weakly populated states, the existence of natively unstructured proteins).