17O solid-state NMR is a highly sensitive probe of structural detail of organic solids but improvements in sensitivity and resolution are crucial for it to be applied to larger biological molecules. Here it is shown that high resolution (∼1 ppm) and significant signal enhancement can be achieved by combining 1H decoupled double rotation (DOR), which narrows the lines by a factor of ∼100 compared to conventional magic angle spinning, and manipulation of the satellite transition populations to transfer magnetisation to the central transition, which produces a signal enhancement of ∼2. © 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.