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Unique Backbone-Water Interaction Detected in Sphingomyelin Bilayers with ¹H/³¹P and ¹H/¹³C HETCOR MAS NMR Spectroscopy

Gregory P. Holland ^* and Todd M. Alam 

^* Magnetic Resonance Research Center, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Arizona State University, Tempe, Arizona; and Department of Nanostructured and Electronic Materials, Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Correspondence: Address reprint requests to Gregory P. Holland, Tel.: 480-965-7915; E-mail: greg.holland{at}asu.edu.

Two-dimensional ¹H/³¹P dipolar heteronuclear correlation (HETCOR) magic-angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is used to investigate the correlation of the lipid headgroup with various intra- and intermolecular proton environments. Cross-polarization NMR techniques involving ³¹P have not been previously pursued to a great extent in lipid bilayers due to the long ¹H-³¹P distances and high degree of headgroup mobility that averages the dipolar coupling in the liquid crystalline phase. The results presented herein show that this approach is very promising and yields information not readily available with other experimental methods. Of particular interest is the detection of a unique lipid backbone-water intermolecular interaction in egg sphingomyelin (SM) that is not observed in lipids with glycerol backbones like phosphatidylcholines. This backbone-water interaction in SM is probed when a mixing period allowing magnetization exchange between different ¹H environments via the nuclear Overhauser effect (NOE) is included in the NMR pulse sequence. The molecular information provided by these ¹H/³¹P dipolar HETCOR experiments with NOE mixing differ from those previously obtained by conventional NOE spectroscopy and heteronuclear NOE spectroscopy NMR experiments. In addition, two-dimensional ¹H/¹³C INEPT HETCOR experiments with NOE mixing support the ¹H/³¹P dipolar HETCOR results and confirm the presence of a H₂O environment that has nonvanishing dipolar interactions with the SM backbone.