Pulse experiments modifications

The full analysis of the Jeener two-pulse experiment was presented in a seminal paper by Aue, Bartholdi and Ernst,3 although the first experimental spectra appeared slightly earlier. 9 Unfortunately, the density matrix methods needed for the analysis rapidly become unwieldy with systems of more than two or three spins. This, together with the need for large data matrices to hold all the information produced by the experiment, has until recently tended to discourage its use. Although very few spectra obtained using the basic Jeener method have been published, a recent modification of the experiment has attracted considerable interest. 

Both of these experiments are available in many different varieties.One of the more useful pulse sequence modifications is the ability to distinguish between protonated carbon types (methine, methylene, and methyl). These are multiplicity edited experiments and should be used as the amount of added information is affectively free relative to the experiment time and setup. This information is complementary to that obtained from the DEPT experiment, since one can also match proton integrals to corresponding carbons to distinguish... 

Fiffire 5.38 Pulse sequence for delayed COSY—a modification of the COSY experiment. The fixed delays at the end of the evolution period t and before the acquisition period <2 allow the detection of long-range couplings between protons. 

The spectrometer supports phase cycling, asynchronous sequence implementation, and parameter-array experiments. Thus, most standard solid-state NMR experiments are feasible, including CPMAS, multiple-pulse H decoupling such as TPPM, 2D experiments, multiple-quantum NMR, and so on. In addition, the focus of development is on its extension of, or modification to, the hardware and/or the software, in the spirit of enabling the users to put their own new ideas into practice. In this paper, several examples of such have been described. They include the compact NMR and MRI systems, active compensation of RF pulse transients, implementation of a network analyzer, dynamic receiver-gain increment,31 and so on. 

Several modifications have been proposed for the basic HNN-COSY experiment. For example, frequency separations between amino and aromatic 15N resonances are typically in the range 100-130 ppm and therefore much larger than between imino 15N donor and aromatic 15N acceptor resonances. As has been pointed out by Majumdar and coworkers [33], such 15N frequency separations are too large to be covered effectively by the non-selective 15N pulses of the homonuclear HNN-COSY. They therefore designed a pseudo-heteronuclear H(N)N-COSY experiment, where selective 15N pulses excite the amino and aromatic 15N resonances separately to yield excellent sensitivity [33]. An inconvenience of this experiment is that the resonances corresponding to the amino 15N nuclei are not detected, and a separate spin-echo difference experiment was used to quantify the h2/NN values. A slightly improved version of this pseudo-heteronuclear H(N)N-COSY [35] remedies this problem by the use of phase-coherent 15N pulses such that both amino and aromatic 15N resonances can be detected in a single experiment. 

In this chapter, the discussion will be focused on the ID TOCSY (TO-tal Correlation SpectroscopY) [2] experiment, which, together with ID NOESY, is probably the most frequently and routinely used selective ID experiment for elucidating the spin-spin coupling network, and obtaining homonuclear coupling constants. We will first review the development of this technique and the essential features of the pulse sequence. In the second section, we will discuss the practical aspects of this experiment, including the choice of the selective (shaped) pulse, the phase difference of the hard and soft pulses, and the use of the z-filter. The application of the ID TOCSY pulse sequence will be illustrated by examples in oligosaccharides, peptides and mixtures in Section 3. Finally, modifications and extensions of the basic ID TOCSY experiment and their applications will be reviewed briefly in Section 4. 

The pulse sequence for ID TOCSY is a ID modification of the original TOCSY experiment [2] introduced by Braunschweiler and Ernst. The TOCSY experiment was also referred to as HOHAHA (which stands for HOmonuclear HArtman-HAhn) by Bax and Davis [3]. The ID TOCSY experiment was proposed by Bax and co-workers [4, 5], and by Kessler et al. [6]. The essential features of the pulse sequence involve the use of selective excitation of a desired resonance, followed by a homonu-clear Hartman-Hahn (or isotropic) mixing period [2, 7]. That is, the unit -Pnonsei - in the 2D TOCSY pulse sequence is replaced by Fsei -where P stands for a pulse (or pulses), ti is the evolution period in the 2D experiment and r is a fixed delay. 

In the previous sections, only the basic, non-gradient ID TOCSY pulse sequence, its experimental aspects and applications were described. In the following, the more recent modifications and extensions of the basic pulse sequence and their applicability to spectral assignments and structural elucidation will be briefly reviewed. Some of these more sophisticated techniques may not be as readily implementable as the basic ID TOCSY experiments, and thus have not yet found wide applications in routine practice. 

---