ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT We describe a solid-state NMR approach to directly study alkali metal ions in DNA and related systems. The focus of this chapter is on the recent soldstate 23Na and 39K NMR results for characterization of ion coordination environments in a special four-stranded DNA structure known as the G-quadruplex. We also introduce a new NMR titration experiment to determine relative ion binding affinity in a site-specific manner. We demonstrate that solid-state alkali NMR can be used to localize alkali metal ions in biological systems, in a complementary fashion to the currently available X-ray crystallographic techniques.
