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…

Drug discovery is a multi-billion dollar industry and chemists play an integral role in many points on the drug discovery roadmap.  To ensure the best possible drug candidate can be produced in the fastest, most efficient and economically friendly fashion, chemists perform innovative research from early-state development through the scaling-up process.  Many analytical techniques including Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy are crucial in the drug discovery process and chemists use these tools daily to characterize reaction products every step of the way.  Once a chemist’s reaction is complete and the desired product isolated, an NMR spectrum of the isolate is acquired.  The chemist then interprets the spectrum by assigning the peaks in the spectrum to the unique sets of protons (1H), or other atoms (13C, 31P, 19F, 11B, etc.), in their desired molecule; corroborating they have made what they sought to make when the reaction was started.

There are all sorts of different research areas in chemistry. Consider my path, for example. When I was just a young undergrad trying to find my calling, I loved tackling mechanisms for organic reactions, but I also loved the “breaking all the rules” in inorganic chemistry. In trying to decide which route I wanted to take, Prof. Stephen Westcott introduced me to the best of both worlds: organo-metallic chemistry. You get all sorts of crazy colours and many of the molecules disobey the conventional rules! You need to be careful though, because many of them will react instantly with water and oxygen. And I mean instantly! For example, although an incredibly simple organometallic molecule, tert-butyllithium (t-BuLi) is incredibly dangerous since it catches fire at the slightest hint of air.

Who doesn’t want to start the day with a warm cup of coffee? Coffee has a stimulating effect on humans because of its caffeine content and for that reason it has become one of the most popular drinks in the world. Some clinical studies actually suggest that small amounts of caffeine everyday might be beneficial for adults. In this blog I am going to highlight an experiment done in collaboration with the Swager group at MIT using an organometallic complex to quantify the caffeine content in regular coffee without sample preparation!

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.

When monitoring reaction progress for determination of reaction kinetic parameters, NMR spectroscopy has increasingly become the method of choice. The ease in which one can calculate the concentration changes of a substrate being consumed or a product being formed over time, directly from peak integration are the reason behind this.

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..