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:

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…

‘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.

We have recurring interest from industrial customers (e.g., pharma, flavour/fragrances) to acquire spectra using only small amounts of analyte in our benchtop NMR instruments – considerably less than our recommended 0.1 M concentration (link).  Why is our recommended concentration so high?  Well, it’s reflective of the consequences of a low-field instrument.  That is, lower-field results in inherently lower sensitivity and accordingly a decrease in observed signal to noise ratio (S/N).

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!