Nuclear Magnetic Resonance-Based Screening Methods for Drug Discovery

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) techniques are widely used in the drug discovery process. The primary feature exploited in these investigations is the large difference in mass between drugs and receptors (usually proteins) and the effect that this has on the rotational or translational correlation times for drugs bound to their targets. Many NMR parameters, such as the diffusion coefficient, spin diffusion, nuclear Overhauser enhancement, and transverse and longitudinal relaxation times, are strong functions of either the overall tumbling or translation of molecules in solution. This has led to the development of a wide variety of NMR techniques applicable to the elucidation of protein and nucleic acid structure in solution, the screening of drug candidates for binding to a target of choice, and the study of the conformational changes that occur in a target on drug binding. Highthroughput screening by NMR methods has recently received a boost from the introduction of sophisticated computational techniques for reducing the time needed for the acquistion of the primary NMR data for multidimensional studies.