This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5).
With support from the Chemistry Research Instrumentation and Facilities: Multiuser program (CRIF:MU), the Chemistry Department at the University of Kansas will acquire a 400 MHz solid state nuclear magnetic resonance (ssNMR) spectrometer. The acquisition will advance a range of research projects, including: 1) identifying and quantifying the various functional groups that reside within the soil, including: carbonyl, phenolic OH, alcohols, aldehydes, amines, ester links, carboxyl groups as well as aromatic rings, 2) quantifying the dynamics and structure of biological macromolecules to determine their role in cellular function and biomolecular recognition, 3) improving the sensitivity of ssNMR to study pharmaceutical solids, 4) establishing the fibrilar structure of the full-length beta2-microglobulin protein in dialysis-related amyloid towards understanding the role amyloid fibrils play in disease, 5) investigating metal binding by teichoic acid, and 6) obtaining mechanistic information concerning enzyme expansion from study of protein backbone dynamics at sites distant from the binding site.
Solid-state NMR spectroscopy is a very powerful analytical technique for the analysis of solids in research fields as diverse as chemistry, materials science, food and agricultural products, pharmaceuticals, biology, soil science, geology, and engineering. The spectra enable researchers to identify and characterize substances. They provide information on the arrangement and connectivity of atoms in molecules and materials i.e. their structures by detecting transitions between energy levels arising from the nuclear spin properties of atoms. This acquisition will promote education and the dissemination of information by training graduate students and postdoctoral associates in performing solid-state NMR experiments and incorporating ssNMR spectroscopy into the undergraduate curriculum. The spectrometer will used by researchers at the University of Missouri- Kansas City, Oklahoma State University, and the University of Oklahoma. It will be open to other researchers throughout the states of Kansas, Missouri, and Oklahoma. The instrument will be cyber enabled to enhance this wide use and allow users to monitor the course of their experiments remotely.
