The Future of NMR — What Can We Expect?

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) has been around for over 50 years as a spectroscopic technique. It helps to provide structural information about molecules from the spin properties - an intrinsic magnetic property - of the molecule’s nuclei.

To perform NMR, the traditional set-up consists of:

• Source for a magnetic field to spin the nuclei
• Method of providing a radio frequency (RF) pulse
• A sample holder, and
• A detector

NMR is become an increasing popular technique, which is one of the reasons why the future of NMR looks so bright. For example, when one of Europe’s leading independent testing laboratories sought an alternative to the standard wet chemistry method for testing the amount of fat in a variety of foods, they converted to a benchtop NMR analyser. You can read more about the switch in this article: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Technology Improves Sample Throughput.

Personalised Medicine

One of the ways NMR might develop in the future is in the field of personalised medicine. New high-throughput NMR can help in the study of phenotypes in delivering a targeted treatment for common illnesses.

The study of phenotypes can reveal how our genes and environment - what we eat, how we live, where we live - affect our health. One of the ways NMR can help is to allow researchers to look at the many metabolites and metabolic pathways, and try to associate each with an illness. Metabolic phenotypes can be used as an indicator of a person’s health. NMR is advantageous as it can analyse a sample without causing any changes to the sample and it can look for low concentrations of analytes in a sample.

The first stage is to build up a database of all the metabolic profiles in samples under similar conditions - a process known as metabolomics - and then analyse the spectra to identify any tendencies towards disease.

By following a large number of people, and repeating the analysis over a period of time, the changing NMR spectra would reveal changes in the phenotype of each person. This information could be used to identify what environmental factors contribute to the phenotype changes, and which phenotype changes could lead to which disease. This will enable doctors to understand the causes of disease and to specify a personalised cure.

Tabletop NMR

The traditional set-up for NMR can be quite bulky. This was because of the size of the magnets used; improvements in the technology for manufacturing magnets have meant that permanent magnets can be made smaller. Consequently, tabletop NMR spectrometers are now seen in analytical laboratories. More information is available in this article - Putting NMR in the Hands of the Undergraduate Chemistry Student

Portable NMR

A team based at Harvard University has recently published an article that could lead the way to a truly portable NMR spectrometer. In the article, Scalable NMR spectroscopy with semiconductor chips, the authors discuss the challenges of making the electronics necessary for a small NMR instrument fit on a 4mm² silicon chip.

Combined with the advances in magnet capabilities, the mounting of the electronics on a chip means a portable instrument capable of meeting many more application demands is realistic. The use of NMR in a production environment - in Quality Control or as a process tool - is a possibility as the capital and maintenance costs should become lower.