A caged lanthanide complex as a paramagnetic shift agent for protein NMR.

A lanthanide complex, named CLaNP (caged lanthanide NMR probe) has been developed for the characterisation of proteins by paramagnetic NMR spectroscopy. The probe consists of a lanthanide chelated by a derivative of DTPA (diethylenetriaminepentaacetic acid) with two thiol reactive functional groups. The CLaNP molecule is attached to a protein by two engineered, surface-exposed, Cys residues in a bidentate manner. This drastically limits the dynamics of the metal relative to the protein and enables measurements of pseudocontact shifts. NMR spectroscopy experiments on a diamagnetic control and the crystal structure of the probe-protein complex demonstrate that the protein structure is not affected by probe attachment. The probe is able to induce pseudocontact shifts to at least 40 A from the metal and causes residual dipolar couplings due to alignment at a high magnetic field. The molecule exists in several isomeric forms with different paramagnetic tensors; this provides a fast way to obtain long-range distance restraints.