The Washington University High Resolution NMR Facility, which serves 30 separate chemical, biochemical and biomedical research groups, requests funding to upgrade a poorly functioning 12 year old 600 MHz NMR spectrometer by purchase of a new state-of-the-art console and triple resonance probe. Our current 600 MHz NMR spectrometer was the second 14.4 T system produced by Varian. It has served well a great many research groups throughout the Washington University chemical and biomedical research community during the past 12 years. However, the spectrometer is fully three design-generations behind the current state-of-the-art. Not unexpectedly, inherent design limitations and rapidly advancing technology in the NMR field have long since overtaken the capabilities of this spectrometer. The spectrometer must be updated if the Facility is to provide for the types of modern-day NMR experiments required by our user base. This urgent request is justified by a growing number of deficiencies of our current 600 MHz NMR system. Among these are the following: a) radio-frequency instability leading to inadequate water suppression and diminished performance in multidimensional experiments, b) inability or extreme difficulty to implement routine software revisions or hardware improvements, c) lack of a fourth rf channel for deuterium irradiation experiments with large biomolecules, a cornerstone of modern NMR structural analysis; d) extensive down time due to ever increasing instrument repair, e) signal- to-noise in triple resonance experiments that is down by 60% compared to that offered by current probe technology.
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