Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Facility (NMR) | NMR Spectroscopy

Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy (NMR) has no doubt been the most influential physical method in organic chemistry during the second half of the 20th century.
Prior to around 1955, all organic structures had to be determined by a combination of chemical tests and degradations.
Nowadays, NMR spectroscopy is probably the single most important physical tool available to a chemist. The developments in NMR instrumentation have continued to decrease the sample size requirement for an NMR spectrum and hence increase the areas for application of NMR spectroscopy.
Unlike other forms of spectroscopy (UV, IR and MS), where one either obtains too little information or more information than can readily interpreted, the interpretation of NMR spectra in terms of fundamental parameters is straightforward in most cases.
The parameters obtained from NMR spectra (chemical shifts, coupling constants, intensities, relaxation times and diffusion coefficients) provide the necessary information for solving a wide variety of problems in chemical and biological sciences.
Recently, the major application of NMR spectroscopy has been in structure elucidations of biologically important molecules, such as proteins, enzymes, DNA etc.
Other applications of NMR include the quantitative determination of the percentage composition of a complex mixture.
Using the chemical shifts and coupling constants obtained from a spectrum, considerable progress can usually be made towards determining the structure of an unknown compound.
In many instances it has been found that certain groups always give rise to a characteristic absorption pattern. This often allows one to immediately distinguish isomers.
The application of NMR to problems involving time dependent phenomena have been increasing. In some cases, it is possible to obtain reaction rates using NMR by carrying out the reaction in the probe of a spectrometer.
Other examples of NMR studies of time-dependent phenomena include conformational analysis, rotational isomerism, restricted rotation, and fast chemical exchange.