It is generally understood that protein-protein interactions proceed via transient encounter complexes that rapidly evolve into the functional stereospecific complex. Direct detection and characterization of the encounter complexes, however, been difficult due to their low population and short lifetimes. Recent application of NMR paramagnetic relaxation enhancement first visualized the structures of the encounter complex ensemble, and allowed the characterization of their physicochemical properties. Further, rational protein mutations that perturbed the encounter complex formation provided a clue to the target search pathway during protein-protein association. Understanding the structure and dynamics of encounter complexes will provide useful information on the mechanism of protein association.

In last three decades, RNA molecules have been revealed to play the central roles in many cellular processes. Structural understanding of RNA molecules is essential to interpret their functions, and many biophysical techniques have been adopted for this purpose. NMR spectroscopy is a powerful tool to study structures and dynamics of RNA molecules, and it has been further applied to study tertiary interactions between RNA molecules, RNA-protein, and RNA-small molecules. This short article accounts for the general methods for NMR sample preparations, and also partially covers the resonance assignments of structured RNA molecules.

Hsp90 is a good drug target molecule that is involved in regulating various signaling pathway in normal cell and the role of Hsp90 is highly emphasized especially in cancer cells. Thus, much efforts for discovery and development of Hsp90 inhibitor have been continued and a few Hsp90 inhibitors targeting the N-terminal ATP binding site are being tested in the clinical trials. There are no metabolic signature molecules that can be used to evaluate the effect of Hsp90 inhibition. We previously found a potential C-domain binder named PPC1 that is a synthetic small molecule. Here we report the metabolomics study to find signature metabolites upon treatment of PPC1 compound in lung cancer cell line, A549 and discuss the potentiality of metabolomic approach for evaluation of hit compounds.

The structural properties and relaxation processes of $MCsSO_4$ (M = Na, K, or Rb) crystals were investigated by measuring the NMR spectra and spin-lattice relaxation rates $1/T_1$ of their $^{23}Na$, $^{39}K$, $^{87}Rb$, and $^{133}Cs$ nuclei. According to the NMR spectra, the $MCsSO_4$ crystals contain two crystallographically inequivalent sites each for the M and Cs ions. Further, the relaxation rates of all these nuclei do not change significantly over the investigated temperature range, indicating that no phase transitions occur in these crystals in this range. The variations in the $1/T_1$ values of the $^{23}Na$, $^{39}K$, $^{87}Rb$, and $^{133}Cs$ nuclei in these three crystals with increasing temperature are approximately proportional to $T^2$, indicating that Raman processes may be responsible for the relaxation. Therefore, for nuclear quadrupole relaxation of the $^{23}Na$, $^{39}K$, $^{87}Rb$, and $^{133}Cs$ nuclei, Raman processes with n = 2 are more effective than direct processes.

Atomistic molecular dynamics (MD) simulation has become mature enabling close approximation of the real behaviors of biomolecules. In biomolecular NMR field, atomistic MD simulation coupled with generalized implicit solvent model (GBIS) has contributed to improving the qualities of NMR structures in the refinement stage with experimental restraints. Here all-atom force fields play important roles in defining the optimal positions between atoms and angles, resulting in more precise and accurate structures. Despite successful applications in refining NMR structure, however, the research that has studied the influence of force fields in GBIS is limited. In this study, we compared the qualities of NMR structures of two model proteins, ubiquitin and GB1, under a series of AMBER force fields-ff99SB, ff99SB-ILDN, ff99SB-NMR, ff12SB, and ff13-with experimental restraints. The root mean square deviations of backbone atoms and packing scores that reflect the apparent structural qualities were almost indistinguishable except ff13. Qualitative comparison of parameters, however, indicates that ff99SB-ILDN is more recommendable, at least in the cases of ubiquitin and GB1.

The transcription factor CP2 regulates various biological systems at diverse tissues and cells. However, none of the four CP2 isoforms has been solved in structure yet. In particular, two different regions of the CP2b isoform have been characterized to interact with the PIAS1 in nucleus to regulate the ${\alpha}$-globin gene expression. Among them, in this study, the region encompassing residues 251-309 of CP2b was prepared as a recombinant protein and its solution structure was characterized by NMR spectroscopy. The results indicated that the CP2b(251-309) fold belongs to typical IDRs (intrinsically disordered regions), likely to facilitate promiscuous interactions with various target proteins. Unfortunately, however, its interaction with the N-terminal domain of PIAS1 (residues 1-70), which has been identified as one of the CP2b-binding sites, was not observed in the NMR-based titration experiments. Therefore, it could be postulated that the 251-309 region of CP2b would not contact with the PIAS1(1-70), but alternatively interact with another CP2b-binding region that encompasses residues 400-651 of PIAS1.

Predicting secondary structure of protein through assigned backbone chemical shifts has been used widely because of its convenience and flexibility. In spite of its usefulness, chemical shift based analysis has some defects including isotopic shifts and solvent interaction. Here, it is shown that corrected chemical shift analysis for secondary structure of protein. It is included chemical shift correction through consideration of deuterium isotopic effect and calculate chemical shift index using probability-based methods. Enhanced method was applied successfully to one of the proteins from Mycobacterium tuberculosis. It is suggested that correction of chemical shift analysis could increase accuracy of secondary structure prediction of protein and small molecule in solution.

In order to obtain information on the structural geometry of $NH_4HSeO_4$ near the phase transition temperature, the spectrum and spin-lattice relaxation time in the rotating frame $T_{1{\rho}}$ for the ammonium and hydrogen-bond protons were investigated through $^1H$ MAS NMR. $T_{1{\rho}}$ for the hydrogen-bond protons abruptly decreased at high temperature and it is associated with the change in the structural geometry in $O-H{\cdots}O$ bonds. This mobility of the hydrogen-bond protons may be the main reason for the high conductivity.