‘The spectra were analyzed according to first order’. Does this sound familiar to you? Most of the supporting information documents out there contain this sentence. You find yourself asking ‘why does nobody care about second order effects?’, then check out this high-order blog entry on the topic.

As I’m sure the readers of this blog know, NMR spectroscopy is used widely across all branches of chemistry due to its powerful structure elucidation capabilities and the inherently quantitative nature of the technique. Organic relies primarily on 1H/13C experiments where as inorganic chemistry can expand to other nuclei, like 31P and 11B. However, there are many other applications for NMR other than just structural elucidation. Perhaps a lesser known application of NMR spectroscopy, is its ability to determine the isotopic ratio of elements! In this blog post I would like to demonstrate a novel method to determine the 10B/11B isotopic ratio using our NMReady-60e and 1H NMR spectra!

Are you familiar with the apodization tool in Mnova? Apodization (also referred to as Weighting or Windowing) literally translates to ‘cutting off the feet’ from the original Greek. In this case…

BODIPY dyes, which are boron difluoride compounds supported by dipyrrinato ligands, have gained recognition as being one of the more versatile fluorophores due to their superior photophysical properties.[1,2] BODIPY derivatives are used as stable functional dyes in several fields such as light harvesters, laser dyes, fluorescent switches, and biomolecular labels.[3-6] They gained popularity as biological probes due to the easy modification of the ligand framework, extension of the chromophore, and substitution of the fluorine atoms.6 Figure 1 shows some commercially available BODIPY dyes used as biological probes.

In the average case one can simply dissolve an analyte in an appropriate deuterated solvent and acquire a simple 1D spectrum to obtain all the required structural information. However, sometimes doing so may not provide you with all of the information you need!

NMR spectroscopy is by far the most useful characterization technique in organic chemistry, especially if you have to elucidate the structure or configuration of your products. Arguably, 2D experiments such as COSY, HSQC, and HMBC have simplified this task tremendously. In this post I wanted to highlight the COSY of α-humulene. Read more.

One of the questions that we always get at tradeshows and conferences is how our instrument compares to high-field data. There are significant inherent differences between low-field and high-field instruments, but the most important from a chemistry point of view are sensitivity (S/N) and resonance dispersion (signal separation). Read More.

Sugar substitutes are gaining more and more relevance due to the health problems associated with the consumption of high amounts of sugar...I thought it would be interesting to take a few of those substitutes and acquire their proton NMR spectrum in our benchtop NMR.

What is process analytical technology (PAT) and why is it so important?PAT is an extremely powerful and useful tool for analyzing, optimizing and controlling chemical processes. Chemical, food and pharmaceutical industries could especially benefit from this technique. In earlier days, chemical processes were primarily monitored by physical techniques, such as temperature, pH, pressure etc..

Last month (which you can see here), we learned about how an acidic proton behaves in a 1H NMR experiment, particularly when it’s surrounded by D2O. For example, when an H+ leaves CH3COOH to join an accommodating D2O molecule, the resulting acetate (H3CCOO–) segment is reasonably comfortable bearing that negative charge. This phenomenon is the reason the solution is “acidic” in the first place. But why is acetate so capable of dealing with this negative electronic charge?