News Archive

DFG provides large-scale equipment grant for dynamic nuclear polarisation

19 December 2011. Researchers of CEF and BMRZ, Clemens Glaubitz, Harald Schwalbe and Thomas Prisner, have been successful with their proposal in a competitive DFG large sale equipment call for Dynamic Nuclear Polarisation.
Dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP) is a method by which the sensitivity of NMR spectroscopy can be enhanced by some orders of magnitude. In essence, it is a combination of electron and nuclear magnetic resonance. Electrons possess a significantly higher magnetic moment than nuclei and are therefore a source of sensitivity enhancement. In the DNP experiment, electrons in stable radicals added to the protein sample are excited by a high power microwave source, a gyrotron, and their magnetization is transferred to nuclei, which are detected through NMR spectroscopy resulting in much larger signal intensities.   
The € 1.2 Mio equipment grant will be used for a new high-power gyrotron to be combined with an existing solid-state NMR spectrometer in the Glaubitz lab. This will allow extending the existing non-commercial DNP setup established by Thomas Prisner and Clemens Glaubitz with a second instrument. At the heart of DNP spectroscopy in Frankfurt are DNP enhanced solid-state NMR applications to macromolecular complexes, development of for liquid-state DNP and development of new pulsed DNP techniques. The new hardware extension will help to carry out a large number of solid-state NMR applications from internal and external users covering membrane proteins, soluble macromolecular protein and RNA complexes and NMR on whole cells.

Link to german press release.

Further informationen: Prof. Clemens Glaubitz, Zentrum für Biomolekulare Magnetische Resonanz (BMRZ), Campus Riedberg, Tel.: +49 (0)69 798-29927, glaubitz@em.uni-frankfurt.de