Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

This equipment application seeks the support for the critically needed accessories to enable state-of-the-art high field nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to be used not only as an instrument for structural characterization, but also a powerful tool for investigating reaction pathways. Equipped with a new Bruker TBO 600 MHz three channel broad band Smartprobe, and with upgraded amplifiers, console boards and data acquisition systems, our 600 MHz spectrometer with be a powerful, highly sensitive machine with unmatched resolution within the NMR facility at UWaterloo. This upgraded instrument will provide a suite of experiments, such as 1D- and 2D 19F (de)coupled experiments that are crucial to the research programs of many new hires within the Faculties of Science and Engineering, the School of Pharmacy and the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. These capabilities are currently unavailable at Waterloo, and they are critical to enabling our HQP to elucidate structures of new organic compounds with high efficacy and speed, and critical to our ability to investigate reaction mechanisms by NMR spectroscopy. The requested TBO probe, and the associated system hardware, amplifiers and data acquisition systems required to integrate it with the current 600 MHz NMR spectrometer, will relieve the huge user backlog for high field NMR that currently exists for our sole 500 MHz instrument on campus. These will also greatly improve and simplify the techniques used by our HQP for structural elucidation of new materials by providing new experiments that are currently unavailable on any of our existing NMR spectrometers. The upgraded NMR will serve the research needs of 34 local research groups from Chemistry, Biochemistry, Biology and Chemical Engineering, and from the School of Pharmacy and the Waterloo Institute for Nanotechnology. The request is critically needed for the continued survival and growth of the diverse synthetic research being conducted at UWaterloo by over 100 current HQP in the field of new materials synthesis, medicinal chemistry, biological chemistry, organic chemistry and chemical engineering and nanotechnology, most of whom depend on high field NMR for their thesis projects.