Probing long‐range anisotropic interactions – A general and sign‐sensitive strategy to measure 1H‐1H residual dipolar couplings as a key advance for organic structure determination

Residual dipolar couplings (RDCs) are amongst the most powerful NMR parameters for organic structure elucidation. In order to maximize their effectiveness in increasingly complex cases such as flexible compounds, a maximum of RDCs between nuclei sampling a large distribution of orientations is needed, including sign information. For this, the easily accessible one-bond (1) H-(13) C RDCs alone often fall short. Long-range (1) H-(1) H RDCs are both abundant and typically sample highly complementary orientations, but accessing them in a sign-sensitive way has been severely obstructed due to the overflow of (1) H-(1) H couplings. Here, we present a generally applicable strategy that allows the measurement of a large number of (1) H-(1) H RDCs, including their signs, which is based on a combination of an improved PSYCHEDELIC method and a new selective constant-time beta-COSY experiment. The potential of (1) H-(1) H RDCs to better determine molecular alignment and to discriminate between enantiomers and diastereomers is demonstrated.