Susceptibility cancellation of a microcoil wound with a paramagnetic-liquid-filled copper capillary

A roadmap to high-resolution standard microcoil MAS NMR spectroscopy for metabolomics

Current microcoil probe technology has emerged as a significant advancement in NMR applications to biofluids research. It has continued to excel as a hyphenated tool with other prominent microdevices, opening many new possibilities in multiple omics fields. However, this does not hold for biological samples such as intact tissue or organisms, due to the considerable challenges of incorporating the microcoil in a magic-angle spinning (MAS) probe without relinquishing the high-resolution spectral data. Not until 2012 did a microcoil MAS probe show promise in profiling the metabolome in a submilligram tissue biopsy with spectral resolution on par with conventional high-resolution MAS (HR-MAS) NMR. This result subsequently triggered a great interest in the possibility of NMR analysis with microgram tissues and striving toward the probe development of "high-resolution" capable microcoil MAS NMR spectroscopy. This review gives an overview of the issues and challenges in the probe development and summarizes the advancements toward metabolomics.

High resolution triple resonance micro magic angle spinning NMR spectroscopy of nanoliter sample volumes

To be able to study mass-limited samples and small single crystals, a triple resonance micro-magic angle spinning (μMAS) probehead for the application of high-resolution solid-state NMR of nanoliter samples was developed. Due to its excellent rf performance this allows us to explore the limits of proton NMR resolution in strongly coupled solids. Using homonuclear decoupling we obtain unprecedented (1)H linewidths for a single crystal of glycine (Δν(CH2) = 0.14 ppm) at high field (20 T) in a directly detected spectrum. The triple channel design allowed the recording of high-resolution μMAS (13)C-(15)N correlations of [U-(13)C-(15)N] arginine HCl and shows that the superior (1)H resolution opens the way for high-sensitivity inverse detection of heteronuclei even at moderate spinning speeds and rf-fields. Efficient decoupling leads to long coherence times which can be exploited in many correlation experiments.