Nuclear Magnetic Resonance of Oriented Bilayer Systems

It is important to elucidate the membrane bound structure of biologically active molecules such as membrane associated pep tides and membrane proteins. It is also realized that not only the structure but also the orientations are important factors to understand the biological activity of the molecules. To obtain the information of structure and orientation for the biomolecules bound to membrane, it is useful to uniformly align the membrane in the NMR spectrometer related to the magnetic field direction. Because a number of peptides and membrane proteins are strongly bound to membrane, these biomolecules can also be aligned to the magnetic field provided that the lipid bilayers are aligned to the magnetic field.