A 500 MHz NMR Spectrometer will be acquired to support research in biochemistry and chemistry. Among the projects to be supported are organic synthesis of heterocyclic compounds, physical, synthetic and organic chemistry of natural products, enzyme mechanism, and peptide and protein folding. Contemporary research methods in 1D and 2D NMR will be done using observations of homonuclei and heteronuclei, chemical shift correlation spectroscopy (COSY), nuclear Overhauser effect correlation spectroscopy (NOESY), and relay transfer spectroscopy. The applications in synthetic chemistry will be of long-term value to industrial development in general and biotechnology in particular; similarly, the biochemical studies, on enzyme mechanism, and peptide and protein folding, address major problems of biological interest and will have an impact in biotechnology and in the long term in health-related research. Without this instrumentation, some of the experiments proposed could not be carried out; others could be carried out only much much more slowly. The instrumentation allows a detailed analysis of physical properties of biological and organic compounds and is essential for progress on the immediate basic scientific questions.
