Improving NMR Resolution and Sensitivity - Simultaneously?

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Knowing the structures and behaviour of molecules is of critical importance in understanding the world around us and in using chemistry to develop new materials. The most useful method for determining molecular structure is NMR spectroscopy. Each hydrogen atom in a molecule - and most molecules contain many - produces a family of signals known as a multiplet. The position of the multiplet within the spectrum (the chemical shift) depends on the local environment of the atom; the multiplet structure depends on interactions (scalar couplings) with nearby atoms. As our understanding of chemistry and biochemistry advances, the species we need to study increase in size and complexity. The number of NMR signals grows accordingly, leading to very crowded, and difficult to interpret, NMR spectra. Chemists and life scientists fight a continual battle to extract structural information from the complex sets of overlapping multiplets that are found in most NMR spectra.Our research will produce a series of NMR methods that produce spectra in which the multiplet structure has been suppressed, with a single signal for each hydrogen atom (a "pure shift" spectrum). We will show how reducing the complexity of NMR spectra can be achieved simply and efficiently, with applications across a wide range of disciplines. Existing pure shift NMR methods are both complex and time-consuming to use; the new family of real-time pure shift experimental methods have the potential to be as simple and as quick to run as normal NMR experiments, but without the complications introduced by multiplet structure. The structural information that scalar couplings provide can still be accessed, by incorporating the new pure shift methods into multidimensional NMR experiments Real-time pure shift NMR methods will find use across a wide range of academic research areas and industrial sectors including chemistry, biochemistry, biology, pharmaceuticals, healthcare, agrochemistry, and flavours and fragrances. They also have the potential to offer a key advance in the automated determination of chemical structure by NMR, removing the need for software to deconvolute the complex two-dimensional multiplets seen in many of the types of spectra currently used for this.