Bruker BioSpin Announces the World’s First Commercial Solid-State DNP-NMR Spectrometer

Solid State DNP-NMR has been pioneered and championed by Professor Robert  Griffin and Dr. Rick Temkin at MIT, with the aim of providing a mechanism to greatly enhance the NMR sensitivity of solid materials. By transferring the magnetization from electron spins to the nuclear spins, signal enhancement factors of ~50x, and up to 150x, can be achieved. This enables researchers to study samples that otherwise would have been inaccessible to NMR, such as for instance certain membrane proteins or samples which are available only in very limited amounts or dilute concentrations.

The signal enhancement is achieved by delivering high-power microwave irradiation (263 GHz) to the electron spins, generated by Bruker’s new, robust and easy-to-use gyrotron system. The NMR samples are typically spun at the magic angle at a temperature of about 100 Kelvin using Bruker’s novel low-temperature MAS probe and the NMR experiments are performed with an Avance III 400 WB system.