At the University of California at Berkeley, the College of Chemistry NMR Facility has been in operation since 1976 and operates an open laboratory accessible 24 hours per day. over 300 fully trained users, including about 10 to 15 from other departments on campus and the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory, operate the instruments.. Due to a decline in state support available to the College over the past decade, we have not been able to upgrade our instruments by this route, and to compound this problem, the University has placed considerable restrictions on matching funds over the past several years. We have thus reached a point where our NMR instrumentation is severely outdate, and lags in terms of capabilities as well as the number of instruments available. Only two instruments meet the performance levels of the major NMR users, an AMX 300 MHz system and a DRX 500 MHz system. We have proposed funding for a 500 MHz NMR spectrometer to accommodate the needs of the NIH User Group comprised of seven established faculty who in aggregate are funded by fourteen major NIH grants. The new instrument must be as flexible as possible to accommodate the broad range of applications of the NIH User Group. Most importantly, the needs of the NIH users require the sensitivity and resolution provided by a 500 MHz instrument. This is clearly indicated by the extremely heavy usage of the single 500 MHz instrument that is currently housed in the NMR facility.
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