The impact over the past five years of the development of microliter-volume, highly mass-sensitive NMR detection probes has been substantial. Combining sensitivity, simplicity, and economy, these room-temperature probes require very minor initial shimming and virtually no shimming or tuning adjustments between individual samples, and do not carry the high cost or maintenance requirements of cryogenically-cooled probe technologies while providing comparable mass sensitivity. As such, they are ideally suited to the analysis of low-abundance analytes typical of liquid chromatography fractions. The proposed effort now offers to extend this product capability to include 19F detection, a technique that is of great importance to university research and to pharmaceutical and other chemical product industries due to the inherent chemical dispersion that 19F offers in terms of chemical shift and due to its natural absence in biological samples. This proposal specifically seeks funding to develop a new category of probe that can accomplish both 1H and 19F detection (using a single probe) to obtain background-free, quality data. A favored approach of this proposal utilizes a unique dual flowcell architecture owned by Protasis to essentially incorporate two separately-optimized probe functionalities into a single mechanical probe package. The potential impact on human health resulting from new generations of economical and practical NMR-based analyzers is extremely high.
This proposal seeks funding to develop a new category of mass-sensitive probe that can accomplish both 1H and 19F detection (using a single probe) to obtain background-free, quality data from low-abundance analytes, e.g. fractions originating from liquid chromatography. Research groups asking for this new generation of high performance NMR detection technology include the pharmaceutical industry, who require an economically-justifiable means to include 19F detection in discovery and development efforts using smaller amounts of sample than was available in the past, and academic researchers who in addition to economy also wish to realize the performance advantages of working at smaller size scale. The potential impact on human health resulting from new generations of economical and practical NMR-based analyzers is extremely high.
