NMR instrumentation: Stanford core facility 800 MHz console

Puglisi, Joseph

Abstract

The Stanford Magnetic Resonance Laboratory SMRL) is a research core facility in the Stanford University School of Medicine, providing high-field NMR instrumentation and expertise to the Stanford research community. The SMRL seeks a new console for the aging Varian Inova 800 MHz spectrometer in order to best support high-field research. The 11 year old 800 spectrometer was purchased in 1998 by Stanford with University funds to stimulate high field spectroscopy. Then, it was one of the first four produced by Varian (console) and Oxford (magnet) in the world. It has served well for the past decade-plus supporting a plethora of NIH-funded research projects. The magnet continues to function well, but the console is showing its age with increased electronic component instabilities and downtimes. By leveraging an existing 800 MHz magnet in an established facility, upgrading the spectrometer console will provide immediate benefits to the high-field user base at a quarter to a third the cost of a entirely new 800 MHz spectrometer system and without need for any new infrastructure improvements. The new console will immediately provide state-of-the-art technology to the challenging projects of the high-field NIH-funded user base at the SMRL (Axel Brunger, Ronald Davis, K. Christopher Garcia, Daniel Herschlag, Brian Kobilka, Roger Kornberg, Merritt Maduke, and Joseph Puglisi). Benefits include highly parallelized architecture, advanced digital filter algorithms, and full digital receiver, enabling the ability to run the most demanding of high- field experiments including advanced support for fast techniques, non-linear sampling methods, and capability for multiple receiver technology. Research efforts from the high-field NMR users range from studying the fundamental workings of the immune system, to seeking a clinical understanding of the physiological contributors to traumatic distress and disease, to utilization of novel model systems of human disease, to screening for new drugs and therapeutics;projects that will all benefit greatly from the shared instrumentation resource to be provided by the NIH.