Chirality has a huge impact on the chemistry of a molecule. Due to potentially different physiological effects, pharmaceutical compounds are often used as enantiomerically pure compounds. One enantiomer can act as a healing agent, the other might be toxic to humans. Crazy, right?

In this blog post, I will talk about how to select a suitable calibrant as well as the difference between using an internal and external calibrant. When conducting qNMR experiments, one of the first things that needs to be considered is how the calibrant is employed to quantitate your sample. Read more.

A key step towards elucidating structures with NMR spectroscopy is the assignment of signals to specific groups within the molecule being analyzed.

Read more on the Nanalysis benchtop NMR (Nuclear Magnetic Resonance) blog. Read more.

…more and more analytical and industrial laboratories have started employing quantitative nuclear magnetic resonance (qNMR) spectroscopy as a tool for content assignment (due to its superb structural elucidation abilities) and quantification of purity in a sample. Read More.

2D NMR experiments provide chemists with evidence to clarify and confirm resonance assignment.  Nowadays every organic chemist uses these experiments called COSY, HMBC and HSQC as routine analytics. Basically, with 2D experiments you correlate some kind of information between two 1D spectra. If we correlate two 1D spectra of the same nucleus we are dealing with homonuclear 2D NMR experiments. The most famous representative of this group is the COSY experiment (find theory here and application here).

For many years tetraethyl lead was used as the principal fuel additive to enhance the octane rating of gasoline. In the mid-1970s the use of this substance was reduced because of the environmental hazards of lead and because it poisons catalytic converters. Nowadays, the main application of lead metal and lead oxide is in lead-acid batteries. In this application the cathode of the cell consists of lead dioxide packed on a metal grid and the anode is composed of lead metal. The electrochemical reaction is shown in the following equation:

Due to the presence of unpaired d electrons in their metal ions, many transition metal complexes are paramagnetic. The unpaired electrons have a magnetic dipole moment due to their spin and act like tiny magnets, resulting in a small net attraction to an externally applied magnetic field. Unsurprisingly, the presence of paramagnetic ions has significant effects on both the chemical shift and lineshape of the 1H NMR spectrum of transition metal complexes, with the chemical shift range being much wider along with broadening of the signals.

By virtue of its quantitative nature, NMR spectroscopy is increasingly becoming the method of choice to monitor a reaction and determine its kinetic parameters. We’ve demonstrated the ability of the NMReady-60 to monitor a reaction and subsequently extract kinetic parameters in a previous blog post. In this blog post, I’d like to show how the NMReady-60 can be used to study enzyme kinetics. Adapted from a Journal of Chemical Education article published by Olsen and Giles, the enzymatic hydrolysis of N-acetyl-DL-methionine by porcine acylase was studied.

For this one I must begin with a little personal background information due to my special relationship to the scaffold of the target compound. During my diploma thesis I investigated gold(I) phosphine complexes as catalysts for the intermolecular hydroamidation of olefins.[1] I found that dinuclear gold complex showed superior reaction times and yields compared to mononuclear complexes, like Ph3PAuCl. This particular dinuclear complex [xantphos(AuCl)2] (1) was kicking the reaction of norbornene (2) and tosyl amide (3) and made my first academic publication possible (scheme 1).

Since it was discovered, the typical trend in NMR Spectroscopy has been towards higher field, evidenced by the rapid replacement of permanent magnets with supercons. Why? Well, NMR Spectroscopy…