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Nuclear magnetic resonance and it's use in biochemistry?

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  • 19-05-2013 6:03pm
    #1
    steddyeddy
    Registered Users Posts: 27,564 ✭✭✭✭


    I work with NMR on a daily basis in the and I find it to be an excellent tool in the health industry. On the other side I feel it's value is seriously underrated. Does anyone in the life and health sciences here work with nmr and what are you opinions on it?


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    #2
    jumpguy
    Registered Users Posts: 7,962 ✭✭✭jumpguy


    NMR is used extensively in the form of the more palatably-named MRI, which there are plenty of variations of (functional MRI, diffusion MRI, T1-weighted and T2-weighted, etc). Unless I'm misunderstanding what you mean?


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    #3
    Danny_Lennon
    Registered Users Posts: 32 ✭Danny_Lennon


    While I'm not directly working with NMR,I've been doing a good bit of personal research lately on its use in measuring lipoproteins as part of blood testing. It certainly seems that NMR gives us a lot of useful information and I think it can play a big role in healthcare in the future.

    Using NMR to measure lipoprotein count has recently been shown to be a much better marker than the traditional cholesterol measures of the conventional lipid profile. I think it's the way forward and hopefully this advanced blood testing becomes more and more common.


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    #4
    flipflp
    Registered Users Posts: 4 ✭flipflp


    steddyeddy wrote: »
    I work with NMR on a daily basis in the and I find it to be an excellent tool in the health industry. On the other side I feel it's value is seriously underrated. Does anyone in the life and health sciences here work with nmr and what are you opinions on it?

    NMR can be used for a huge variety of things in Biochemistry:

    It can be used to observe catalytic intermediates, enzyme-inhibitor complexes and to study the effects of pH on various substances. This is all carried out by examining changes in the peaks of NMR spectra.

    One of the most important uses of NMR in Biochemistry is the ability to use different types of NMR such as COSY, NOSEY and TOCSY to determine protein structure without having to crystallise the protein. The protein is studied in solution so changing the pH/temperature of the solution allows us to see the effects of these changes on the structure of the protein.

    One more important function of NMR is in drug discovery: (this is sort of in relation to enzyme-inhibitor complexes) you can quantify the binding of the drug to protein, you can identify drug binding sites and investigate the dynamics of drug-receptor interactions. An important function of NMR here is its use in fragment based drug discovery, which involves testing the effects of a large number of small, easily made components on a target rather than synthesizing a huge complex drug. The best of these small fragments can eventually be linked to produce to give a lead compound for drug development.


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