Wiithrich, Kurt

A Collection of Papers by Kurt Wiithrich by Kurt Wiithrich... 

The year 2002 was an extraordinary year for liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC/MS) practitioners. On October 9, 2002, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences annonnced their decision to award the Nobel Prize in Chemistry to John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka, and Kurt Wiithrich for their development of analytical methods for the identification and structnral analysis of biological macromolecnles. Fenn and Tanaka shared the prize for developing electrospray and soft-laser desorption, respectively. These soft-ionization techniqnes allow macromolecules to be ionized withont fragmentation. 

Kurt Wiithrich Switzerland NMR analysis of biological macromol-ecules... 

The program fits the intensity at these point values to a polynomial (up to 5th order) function and then subtracts the polynomial function from the whole dataset. This is repeated for each ID slice (row or column) of the 2D data matrix. More sophisticated methods calculate the baseline points automatically and use functions other than polynomials. For example, a program called FLATT (by Kurt Wiithrich) is very effective at removing horizontal or vertical streaks resulting from baseline curvature in rows or columns of the data matrix. Especially with NOESY and ROESY databaseline correction is essential to getting clean 2D displays and plots. 

The present suitability and versatility of NMR to study macromolecules has been made available, among others, by the pioneering work of Nobel laureates Richard R. Ernst and Kurt Wiithrich (Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1991 and 2002). The established protocol of structure determination by NMR consists of the... 

In Chapter 13, we summarize the ways in which NMR methods can be applied to determine the structures of moderate size (usually organic) molecules. We then describe briefly the use of NMR methods in conjunction with computational energy minimization procedures to determine the three-dimensional structures of macromolecules. With the systematic approach put forth by Kurt Wiithrich and his coworkers beginning in the 1980s, along with more sophisticated pulse techniques developed by Ad Bax and others, it is now possible to determine structures of proteins with precision rivaling that of x-ray crystallography. 

Application of NMR to three-dimensional structure determination is covered in several books, including NMR of Proteins and Nucleic Acids by Kurt Wiithrich,60 NMR of Proteins edited by G. M. Clore and A. M. Gronenborn,131 Biomolecular NMR Spectroscopy by Jeremy Evans,132 and Protein NMR Spectroscopy by John Cavanagh et al,120... 

Since the publication of the first edition of this book, there have been many important developments in the field of NMR spectroscopy. These developments have included the award of two Nobel prizes in 2002 to Kurt Wiithrich for his major contributions to biomolecular NMR spectroscopy and in 2003 to Paul C. Lauterbur and Sir Peter Mansfield for their work on MRI, both awards confirming the scientific importance of the general method and its wide application. Consequently, this second edition has been extended to incorporate a number of these pulse sequence developments. Nevertheless, to understand these sophisticated methods it is still necessary that students and newcomers start with the basic experiments and proceed on a step-by-step basis. In this context NMR-SIM is an outstanding, user-friendly simulation program that may be used by both the novice and the expert as an efficient training tool. Therefore, it is no surprise that BRUKER have included NMR-SIM in their latest spectrometer software package TOPSPIN. 

John B. Fenn, Koichi Tanaka, Kurt Wiithrich 1948 Arne Tiselius... 

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is arguably the most important analytical technique available to chemists. From its humble beginnings in 1945, the area of NMR spectroscopy has evolved into many overlapping subdisciplines. Luminaries have been awarded several recent Nobel prizes, including Richard Ernst in 1991 and Kurt Wiithrich in 2002. 

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