Here’s a tip for you when acquiring long experiments manually: use the Autoshim feature. Located in the BSMS control window, clicking “Start” will ensure your shim quality stays good over long periods (~4+ hours). But when you’re done, be sure to click “Start” again to toggle it off, or else it’ll continue operating when the next user is trying to run, which will surprise them and give them inconvenience.
Many chemical structure questions can be answered with 1H-1H distance estimates derived from the 1D NOESY experiment. There are a variety of ways to set up this experiment, but we now have two short videos that UChicago users can access with their phones at the spectrometer – no homework or special prep required.
Tweaks have been made to all default 1H and 13C 1D and 2D experiment parameter sets so they have been tested as effective and are the same on all spectrometers. If you have a 10mg properly-prepared sample, you are assured of getting good data using default parameters with these experiments no matter which instrument you use.
The new 400-2 is ready for use! With this upgrade, the spectrometer has transformed into an automated high-throughput engine for routine data acquisition. “Routine” now includes a variety of standard 2D experiments, plus 1D experiments for a growing assortment of NMR-active nuclei.
Major events took place in Week 1 of reopening, including a number of hardware and software upgrades to NMR systems. For Week 2, expect to continue using 400-1 for routine work. Other systems are actively being configured and upgraded in various ways, so please be patient.