Phosphorus NMR spectroscopy, in vivo

H. Hofeler, D. Jensen, M. M. Pike, J. L. Delayre, V. P. Cirillo, C. S. Springer, Jr, E. T. Fossel and J. A. Balschi (1987). Sodium transport and phosphorus metabolism in sodium-loaded yeast simultaneous observation with sodium-23 and phosphorus-31 NMR spectroscopy in vivo. Biochemistry, 26, 4953-4962. 

M. Rudin and A. Sauter, In vivo phosphorus-31 NMR potential and limitations. in In-Vivo Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy III In-Vivo MR Spectroscopy Potential and Limitations, M. Rudin (ed.), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, 1992,161-188. 

NMR spectroscopy is one of the cornerstones of modern natural products research and is used routinely to monitor compound purity through the isolation procedure and to determine the structure of novel bioactives. NMR also has a long history of use in metabolism studies utilizing proton and phosphorus nuclei in both liquid and solid states and in vivo and in vitro. More recently, NMR has been applied in metabolomics (or metabonomics) for metabolite profiling, quantification, and structure elucidation.4... 

This section summarizes the literature for NMR spectroscopy of environmental samples. Due to space constraints, NMR studies of compounds with chemical shifts outside the spectral width of biological phosphorus compounds, such as pesticides (see Condron et ah, 1997 for a recent review), or biological P NMR studies such as in vivo NMR (e.g. Lee and Ratcliffe, 1993) or mycorrhizal studies (e.g. Martin et ah, 1983) are not included. Space also limits a detailed discussion of all environmental P NMR papers. Instead, they are grouped into tables based on the type of material studied or the type of NMR experiment. Some papers may appear in more than one table. 

The phosphorus nuclei are well suited for biological and medical investigations. Relatively simple high resolution P NMR spectra are obtained for the chemically different phosphorus atoms of cell metabolism products. The quality of the spectra which can be obtained from living systems (in vivo P NMR spectroscopy) allows to detect metabolic changes. Furthermore, the position of the P resonance of inorganic phosphate in the cell is a sensitive indicator for the intracellular pH value [119]. 

The first in vivo experiments were carried out using NMR spectroscopy. This nuclide is particularly favourable because it has 100% natural abundance, high intrinsic sensitivity, the number of organic phosphorus compounds is relatively few and such molecules are important in cellular processes particularly for energy balance. 

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