Employing of 13C stable-isotopes in NMR metabolomics can give unique splitting patterns and coupling constants information originated from 13C-13C coupling interaction that provide an important structural information regarding the cellular metabolic process. But it has been known that an undesirable signal distortion in 2D heteronuclear correlation study, due to 13C-13C interaction, hampers an analysis of the coupling information. Recently, we proposed J-scaled distortion-free heteronuclear single-quantum coherence (HSQC) sequence which provides a distortion-free 13C-13C coupling information with a selective resolution enhancement of JCC splitting. In this paper, we dicuss theoretical aspect and practical feature of J-scaled HSQC pulse sequence. The conceptual explanation of orgin of the signal distortion by 13C-13C coupling interaction and design of J-scaled HSQC through exemplified results are provided in brief.

Transthyretin (TTR) is an important transporter protein for thyroxine (T4) and a holo-retinol protein in human. In its native state, TTR forms a tetrameric complex to construct the hydrophobic binding pocket for T4. On the other hand, this protein is also infamous for its amyloidogenic propensity, which causes various human diseases, such as senile systemic amyloidosis and familial amyloid polyneuropathy/cardiomyopathy. In this work, to investigate various structural features of TTR with solution-state nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, we conducted backbone NMR signal assignments. Except the N-terminal two residues and prolines, backbone 1H-15N signals of all residues were successfully assigned with additional chemical shift information of 13CO, 13Cα, and 13Cβ for most residues. The chemical shift information reported here will become an important basis for subsequent structural and functional studies of TTR.