Structural Chemistry

Papua New Guinea Landscape, near collection sites for many species of marine cyanobacteria.

The structure elucidation of neurotoxins and unknown environmental chemicals represents the major uses of the NMR spectrometers of this Facility Core. Center investigators and their trainees utilize this facility, either directly or through one of the NMR facility operators, to determine the structures of organic molecules. In some cases, NMR is the most rapid and unequivocal method by which to demonstrate the chemical identity of known materials. However, its greatest power lies in its ability to facilitate the structural elucidation of new compounds for which there is no chemical precedent. While this is most easily accomplished with pure materials, new NMR pulse sequences, including some developed by members of the Facility Core, are designed to selectively view individual components within a mixture (e.g. DOSY-based methods). The variety of field strengths that are available combined with the modern probe and hardware configurations of these instruments, along with the excellent adaptation of contemporary NMR pulse sequences to solving structural problems, makes this facility of broad applicability to Center Investigators.