NMR Spectroscopy - Magic Angle Spinning
Magic angle spinning (MAS) NMR spectroscopy allows the rapid analysis of intact tissue samples at high resolution and can inform the analyst on a range of properties that distinguish tissues from biofluids, such as comparmentation, differential diffusion and degradation.
MAS provides an opportuity to provide rapid profiling in a surgical / clinical context as an augmentation of the existing realtime measures available.
We have recently shown that MAS-NMR can be used to characterise intact tissue metabolites and enables discrimination of tumour type (primary vs secondary) in surgical biopsies and the investigation of intracellular/extracellular compartmentation of water and other metabolites in whole tissues and cells.
The combination of DOSY and MAS technologies (with the use of z-gradient MAS probes) promises to be a major advance in NMR-based diagnostics and as a means of understanding molecular interactions in whole tissues.
The relevance and utility of this research has recently been highlighted in a clinical context, with the installation of a NMR facility in a surgical environment within the Faculty of Medicine for providing rapid profile data during surgery.
Key Recent Publications
Beckonert O, Coen M, Keun HC, Wang YL, Ebbels TMD, Holmes E, Lindon JC, Nicholson JK. 2010. High-resolution magic-angle-spinning NMR spectroscopy for metabolic profiling of intact tissues. Nature Protocols 5(6):1019-32.
Chan EC, Koh PK, Mal M, Cheah PY, Eu KW, Backshall A, Cavill R, Nicholson JK, Keun HC. 2009. Metabolic profiling of human colorectal cancer using high-resolution magic angle spinning nuclear magnetic resonance (HR-MAS NMR) spectroscopy and gas chromatography mass spectrometry (GC/MS). J Proteome Res 8(1):352-61.
Lindon JC, Beckonert OP, Holmes E, Nicholson JK. 2009. High-resolution magic angle spinning NMR spectroscopy: Application to biomedical studies. Progress in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy 55(2):79-100.
