An Acrylonitrile-Based Copolymer Gel as an NMR Alignment Medium for Extraction of Residual Dipolar Couplings of Small Molecules in Aqueous Solution.

An NMR weakly-aligning polymer gel has been prepared by copolymerization of acrylonitrile and 2-acrylamide-2-methyl-1-propanesulfonic acid in the presence of 1,4-butanediol diacrylate as a cross-linker. The polymer readily swells in water in a large range of temperatures, although the swelling ratio is decreased in saline solutions. The swollen gel can be mechanically compressed, in a reversible way, generating anisotropy, as easily shown in 2 H NMR experiments, and allowing measurement of 1 D CH residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) through F1-coupled HSQC experiments. The performance of this gel as a NMR alignment medium was evaluated in several water-soluble organic molecules and, while it provided RDCs of proper size for sucrose and even such as small molecule as 5-norbornen-2-ol, in the case of azidothymidine and cefuroxime sodium salt the strong interaction of these molecules with the gel prevented successful extraction of the RDCs.