The World's Most Powerful NMR Spectrometer

Wright commented, "It's fantastic. The capabilities of this instrument take us to a new level."

The instrument is the first of its kind and has been several years in the making by its German manufacturer, Bruker Instruments, Inc.

TSRI is a leader in high-powered NMR instrumentation, with 10 instruments at or above 500 MHz. Wright continued, "It's a very big deal to have the first major instrument of this type in this city. It reinforces our position at the leading edge of molecular and structural biology."

NMR spectroscopy is a diagnostic tool for chemistry and biology; additionally, it forms the basis for the technique of magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) in medicine. In a research context, NMR provides atomic coordinates of a wide range of biologically important molecules in solution. This information enables scientists to determine the structure-function relationships of molecules that lie at the heart of understanding fundamental biological processes.

Determining the three-dimensional structures of proteins and nucleic acids provides important insights into the basic questions about how living organisms function and change, and how particular alterations can lead to human disease. Structural biology is seen by scientists as particularly important in today's research environment: while the genomes of humans and several other organisms have been solved, the structures of most of the proteins which the tens of thousands of genes encode remain a mystery.

In an NMR experiment, a sample in a long tube is inserted into the magnet, which consists of several superconducting coils surrounded by an outer dewar containing liquid helium. Atomic nuclei of molecules inside the tube give detectable responses to a radio frequency signal emitted by the inner coil at varying "resonance" frequencies.

A typical experiment involves scanning a range of frequencies and recording the responses of the atoms in the sample. These responses are influenced by the shape of the molecule in which the atoms reside – by their proximity to other atoms in the molecule. An NMR spectrum is unique for a particular molecule, and the structure of a molecule can be determined from its spectrum.