Brucine is a structurally complex molecule, commonly found in the bark and seeds of the Strychnos nux-vomica tree, which is native to India and southeast Asia.1 A toxic alkaloid, brucine is typically present alongside strychnine, a structurally almost identical molecule that is more toxic than brucine.

Magnets used to manufacture low-field and high-field NMR spectrometers are not perfect and the magnetic field that they generate is prone to drift for a variety of reasons. However, during an NMR experiment it is important to keep the magnetic field as stable as possible to prevent the signals from drifting. This is taken care of by the lock system.

Acidity is something that you encounter on a daily basis, probably without even realizing it. The tangy taste of an orange (citric acid), that Vitamin C tablet you took this morning (ascorbic acid), those terrible jeans from the 80’s that you still wear (acid wash). My favourite acid is acetic acid.

‘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.

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…

If you’ve ever prepared an NMR sample, you’re familiar with the fact that we almost always use deuterated solvents to dissolve our samples of interest…

While low-field NMR has extremely favourable accessibility and affordable characteristics, the most common question that we get asked about our family of benchtop NMR spectrometers is with respect to any trade-offs that come from moving to lower-field.

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.

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?