Using cryoprobes to decrease acquisition times of triple-resonance experiments used for protein resonance assignments

In most structural biology NMR laboratories, instrument time is a limiting factor in the number of structural projects a laboratory is able to support. In the post-genomic era we can expect the number of structural targets to markedly increase. Here we address to what degree recently introduced cryoprobes, which are 3-4 times as sensitive as conventional probes, can alleviate this problem. To evaluate this approach, a set of triple-resonance experiments for protein assignments were acquired with a cryoprobe. We show that, with the cryoprobe, high quality triple-resonance data can be obtained within as 4 hours/experiment. These results show that a full set of data for protein assignments can now be practically collected in 1-2 days.