Heteronuclear Overhauser effect pulse sequences

The NMR signals of insensitive nuclear spins can be enhanced by transferring polarization from a more sensitive species to which they are coupled. The well-known pulse sequences as the polarization transfer techniques are insensitive nuclei enhanced by polarization transfer (INEPT), distortionless enhancement by polarization transfer (DEPT), and reverse insensitive nuclei enhanced by polarization transfer (RINEPT) The INEPT sequence is an alternative to the nuclear Overhauser effect. The INEPT experiment does not require any particular relaxation mechanism and therefore a better enhancement factor can be obtained. Furthermore it is demonstrated that INEPT sequence can be used to determine the multiplicity of each signal in a NMR spectrum. More recently, the INEPT and DEPT experiments were used for the coherence transfer via heteronuclear J-coupling between spin-1/2 and quadrupolar nuclei in the solids. " Fyfe et showed that coherence transfer via the scalar coupling between spin-1/2 and quadrupolar nuclei can be obtained in the solid state by using INEPT experiment. 

Dipolar Couplings and Distance Information. - The nuclear Overhauser effect (NOE) arises from dipolar interactions between magnetic moments associated with nuclear spins and it has become a powerful tool to extract relevant pieces of structural information about small molecules, as well as in molecules of biological interest. As a consequence, accurate NOE measurement is a very crucial issue. Walker et presented a comparison between direct and a new inverse HOESY experiment aimed at the detection of heteronuclear NOE between H and which is particularly well suited for symmetric compounds. It transpires that directly detected data are more suitable for quantitative assessment even if they suffer from lower sensitivity, whereas inverse detection is quite appropriate for a quick and quahtative assessment. In the latter experiment, unwanted cross-correlation effects may hide valuable NOE data (cross-relaxation), this drawback can be circumvented by a slight modification of the pulse sequence. 

These experiments use pulse sequences similar to that of the spin-echo experiment. There are a number of experiments with different pulse sequences. The different experiments are commonly named with acronyms. For example, COSY (Correlation SpectroscopY) was the original two-dimensional NMR experiment. Some other experiments are NOESY (Nuclear Overhauser Effect SpectroscopY) and HETCOR (HETeronuclear CORrelation). The usual goal of a COSY experiment is to determine which lines belong to which multiplet in a complicated spectrum with overlapping multiplets. We will give a simplified description of the COSY experiment for proton NMR (this is sometimes called HH-COSY). 

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