An award is made to the Ohio State University to acquire, install, and operate a state-of-the-art ultrahigh field 1.2 GHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer at the National Gateway Ultrahigh Field NMR Center. This next generation NMR instrument will provide critical research infrastructure that is currently lacking in the US, increasing our economic competitiveness with substantial impact on diverse areas, such as energy conversion and storage, new materials, molecular modeling, synthetic biology, diagnostic approaches, drug design, and personalized medicine. The Center will provide unique opportunities to attract and train young STEM scientists at the undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral levels, including those from underrepresented groups, who constitute a rapidly growing fraction of NMR researchers. Active learning of NMR concepts and applications will be promoted through local workshops, the regional Gateway NMR conference, a high school day, an industry day, and national workshops and conferences. These activities will increase academic and industry partnerships within the national and regional NMR communities to carry the many scientific promises of NMR at 1.2 GHz to fruition.
Over the past several years, OSU has built one of the largest and most advanced shared NMR facilities in the nation as part of the Campus Chemical Instrument Center (CCIC). NMR's non-invasive, non-destructive, quantitative, and highly reproducible nature has turned it into one of the most versatile physical techniques providing atomic detail insights into the inner workings of a myriad of molecular systems and materials, many of which have enormous complexity and extraordinary properties. Recent developments in high-temperature superconducting (HTS) wire technology have allowed the construction of next generation ultrahigh field NMR magnets up to 1.2 GHz. The acquisition of a 1.2 GHz NMR instrument at OSU will fulfill an urgent national and regional need for such instrumentation, enabling transformative research that addresses fundamentally new scientific questions to be carried out for a large number of chemical and biochemical systems. These include microscopic properties of nano- and non-crystalline materials, biomolecular structure, dynamics, and function of large and/or weak protein and RNA complexes, intrinsically disordered proteins and their interactions with nanomaterials, and metabolomics. This research will enable a deeper understanding of biological interactions, communication, and function at the molecular level and support the design of materials with novel properties. The 1.2 GHz NMR spectrometer will be operated as a national center with both regional users and those from across the US, including users from academia, national labs, and industry. This project is supported by the Foundation-wide Mid-scale Research Infrastructure program. The project will be managed by the Division for Biological Infrastructure within the Directorate for Biological Sciences.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
