By Hanming Yang
Graduate Student (Cavagnero Group)
A recent cover article from the Cavagnero research team has appeared in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance. The Cavagnero group developed a novel optically-enhanced nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) technology known as LC-photo-CIDNP. This method leads to an increase of NMR sensitivity for the detection of biomolecules in solution by ca. 2 orders of magnitude. In this work, the authors discovered that employing trace amount of reductive radical quenchers like vitamin C (a.k.a. ascorbic acid) greatly reduces the extent of photo-damage during LC-photo-CIDNP experiments. This strategy led to the detection of amino acids and proteins in solution with an additional 100% increase in sensitivity, enabling ultra-rapid 1D and 2D NMR data collection at nanomolar and low-micromolar concentration. View the publication >>