Cryoprobe for a 600 Mhz NMR spectrometer

University Of Maryland Baltimore, Baltimore MD

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Abstract

Principal investigators at The University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMP) have a scientific need for a cryoprobe for our existing 600 MHz nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer to support and enhance NIH funded research efforts. Users of the UMB NMR center include faculty members from the School of Medicine, the School of Pharmacy, the Greenebaum Cancer Center, and the University of Maryland Biotechnology Institute (UMBI). An established advisory committee, which has members from each of the above institutions, will continue to administer the management of the NMR facility including new policies for assuring equitable sharing of the NMR instrumentation. The increased sensitivity (approximately 4-fold) of this probe will have two major benefits. First, we will be able to significantly increase the data output of the UMB Center for Structural Biology because significantly less time will be required per NMR experiment. This will also help to diminish the waiting periods that now exist for NMR time. Secondly, we will able to study more dilute samples (,0.5mM). This is particularly important in cases when large quantities of sample are unavailable or when NMR spectra at higher concentrations are low quality due to undesired protein aggregation. In these cases, implementation of cryoprobe technology on our 600 MHz spectrometer, where the signal to noise ratio (SNR) will be enhanced by 300-500%, is more important than data collection at higher fields because the increases in sensitivity form higher field spectrometers (30-60%l 800-900 MHz) are currently modest in comparison.