Two-Dimensional Spectroscopy as a Conformational Probe of Cellular Phosphates

Abstract

Cellular phosphates have been extensively investigated by a variety of techniques to determine their conformations, concentrations, and metal binding properties. The ubiquity of cellular phosphates in biological systems insures their continuing popularity, which has recently increased quite considerably with the advent of their in vivo detection via phosphorus-31 NMR (Hoult et al., 1974; Moon and Richards, 1973; Shulman, 1983). Investigation of the conformation of a particular cellular phosphate in a pure solution is reasonably straightforward. NMR is the method of choice. The advantages are many, not the least of which is the vast literature available correlating proton coupling constants and chemical shifts to conformational and structural features (Davies, 1978; Guschlbauer, 1980). The literature on nucleotides, alone, is prodigious.