Solid-State Nuclear Magnetic Resonance of Quadrupolar Nuclei with Applications to Biological Solids

This thesis reports on the development of new methods for studying spin > 1/2 nucleiin solids using nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), and the application of these and othersolid-state NMR techniques to probing local structure in biological solids.The need to improve solid state NMR methods for quadrupolar nuclei, with emphasison applications to biopolymers, is motivated in Chapter 1. The requisite theory for describingnuclear spin systems under NMR experiments is extensively described in Chapter 2. Thereare four important derivations in Chapter 2, with supporting calculations in the appendices,which do not appear together in any single source in the literature. Some are straightforward,such as the perturbation treatment in Section 2.2.2.; however the tensor expansion in Section2.2.4 is more complex. It is hoped that this may assist others who undertake to develop abackground in quadrupolar theory. Chapter 3 presents several new methods for single-resonance NMR spectroscopy ofhalf-integer quadrupolar nuclei, while Chapter 4 presents new double-resonance methodswhich provide multi-spin correlations involving quadrupolar nuclei.Chapter 5 begins with an instructive demonstration of the utility of "B NMR in an X-lytic protease-inhibitor complex, and presents an in-depth 23Na NMR study of guanine richoligonucleotides which model human chromosomal telomeres. Chapter 6 will brieflysummarize this work and emphasize important outstanding problems.