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Recently, Santos et al. published an article titled “Chirality-Induced Electron Spin Polarization and Enantiospecific Response in Solid-State Cross-Polarization Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” in ACS Nano. In this article it was claimed that crystalline amino acid enantiomers can give rise to 1H-15N and 1H-13C cross-polarization magic angle spinning (CPMAS) solid-state NMR spectra with different relative signal intensities. The authors attributed such differences to transient changes in T1 relaxation times resulting from an interaction between the electron spins and the radiofrequency contact pulses used in the CPMAS experiment, and discussed this proposed phenomenon in terms of the chirality-induced spin selectivity (CISS) effect. We disagree with the authors conclusion that the CISS effect plays a role in the different signal intensities observed in the CPMAS solid-state NMR spectra of crystalline enantiomers. Quantitative 13C CPMAS experiments on aspartic acid enantiomers demonstrate that CPMAS signal variations can likely be attributed to sample dependent differences in T1 relaxation times rather than any chirality effects. 

We demonstrate that natural isotopic abundance 2D heteronuclear correlation (HETCOR) solid-state NMR spectra can be used to significantly reduce or eliminate the broadening of 1 H and 13 C solid-state NMR spectra of organic solids due to anisotropic bulk magnetic susceptibility (ABMS). ABMS often manifests in solids with aromatic groups, such as active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), and inhomogeneously broadens the NMR peaks of all nuclei in the sample. Inhomogeneous peaks with full widths at half maximum (FWHM) of ∼1 ppm typically result from ABMS broadening and the low spectral resolution impedes the analysis of solid-state NMR spectra. ABMS broadening of solid-state NMR spectra has previously been eliminated using 2D multiple-quantum correlation experiments, or by performing NMR experiments on diluted materials or single crystals. However, these experiments are often infeasible due to their poor sensitivity and/or provide limited gains in resolution. 2D 1 H– 13 C HETCOR experiments have previously been applied to reduce susceptibility broadening in paramagnetic solids and we show that this strategy can significantly reduce ABMS broadening in diamagnetic organic solids. Comparisons of 1D solid-state NMR spectra and 1 H and 13 C solid-state NMR spectra obtained from 2D 1 H– 13 C HETCOR NMR spectra show that the HETCOR spectrum directly increases resolution by a factor of 1.5 to 8. The direct gain in resolution is determined by the ratio of the inhomogeneous 13 C/ 1 H linewidth to the homogeneous 1 H linewidth, with the former depending on the magnitude of the ABMS broadening and the strength of the applied field and the latter on the efficiency of homonuclear decoupling. The direct gains in resolution obtained using the 2D HETCOR experiments are better than that obtained by dilution. For solids with long proton longitudinal relaxation times, dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) was applied to enhance sensitivity and enable the acquisition of 2D 1 H– 13 C HETCOR NMR spectra. 2D 1 H– 13 C HETCOR experiments were applied to resolve and partially assign the NMR signals of the form I and form II polymorphs of aspirin in a sample containing both forms. These findings have important implications for ultra-high field NMR experiments, optimization of decoupling schemes and assessment of the fundamental limits on the resolution of solid-state NMR spectra.