“ 1JCH NMR Profile: Identification of key structural features and functionalities by visual observation and direct measurement of one-bond proton-carbon coupling constants” by Núria Marcó, A.A. Souza, Pau Nolis, Carlos Cobas, R. R. Gil and Teodor Parella. Journal of Organic Chemistry 2017, 276 : 37.42. DOI: 10.1021/acs.joc.6b02873
A user-friendly NMR interface for the visual and accurate determination of experimental one-bond proton-carbon coupling constants (1JCH) in small molecules is presented. This intuitive 1JCH profile correlates directly delta(1H) and 1JCH facilitates the rapid identification and assignment of 1H signals belonging to key structural elements and functional groups. Illustrative examples are provided for some target molecules including terminal alkynes, strained rings, electronegative substituents or lone-pair bearing heteronuclei.
Last December, Esperança Ramírez, our facility secretary, defended her PhD Thesis entitled: “Edició crítica dels escolis al cant IX de l’Odissea” (Critical Edition of the Scholia to the Odyssey Book IX). The thesis defense took place at 11am on Friday 16 December in the Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres of Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona.
Scholia (singular scholium or scholion, from Ancient Greek: σχόλιον, “comment, interpretation”) are grammatical, critical, or explanatory comments, either original or extracted from pre-existing commentaries, which are inserted on the margin of the manuscript of an ancient author, as glosses. Scholia definition in the Wikipedia
In her doctoral dissertation she does a thorough, critical and updated edition of the scholia to the Odyssey Book IX, including the scholia regarded as minor as well as the major scholia. This book and the following three books are collectively referred to as the apologoi: Odysseus’ “stories”, and they have attracted the attention of scholars of Homer works of all times.
To carry out her research work, she had to systematically analyse and challenge previous editions that, in full or in part, included scholia from the Odyssey Book IX, and, on the other hand, she had to decide the corpus of manuscripts that she would study, which was finally set to 37 from different typologies and genetic filiations.
Example of a handwritten manuscript studied in this thesis, the text of the Odyseey is on the left column, major scholia (comments) are on the right column, and minor scholia are interspersed in between the lines of the Odyssey text.
It stands out the methodological novelty of classifying the scholia according to their content: related to the titles, dedicated to argument summaries, focused on lexicographic aspects, contextual or mythographic. This classification, on top of helping to understand the content of each scholium, offers too an interesting view of the filiation of manuscripts.
Her goal was to offer a body of data encompassing the scholia, the annotations and also the most significant corrections of the Homeric text. In that corpus there are several types of content, from multiple versions of myths to words that must be construed, including syntactic expressions or morphological annotations.
Accurate measurement of JHH in overlapped signals by a TOCSY-edited SERF Experiment.André Fredi, Pau Nolis and Teodor Parella. Magnetic Resonance in Chemistry, Volume 55, Issue 6, June 2017, Pages 525-529. DOI: 10.1002/mrc.4572
Selective Refocusing (GSERF or the recent PSYCHEDELIC) experiments were originally designed to determine all proton-proton coupling constants (JHH) for a selected proton resonance. They work for isolated signals on which selective excitation can be successfully applied but, as happens in other selective experiments, fail for overlapped signals. To circumvent this limitation, a doubly-selective TOCSY-GSERF scheme is presented for the measurement of JHH in protons resonating in crowded regions. This new experiment takes advantage of the editing features of an initial TOCSY transfer to uncover hidden resonances that become accessible to perform the subsequent frequency-selective refocusing.
Studies on cycloalkane‐based bisamide organogelators: A new example of stochastic chiral symmetry breaking induced by sonication
Ortuno, R. M., Pi-Boleda, B., Sans, M., Campos, M., Nolis, P., Illa, O., Estévez, J. C. and Branchadell, V. (2016), Chem. Eur. J.. Accepted Author Manuscript. doi:10.1002/chem.201604818
Enantiomerically pure C16-alkyl amides derived from cis and trans cycloalkane-1,2-dicarboxylic acids, respectively, have been synthesized and their behaviour as organogelators has been investigated. These compounds include cis/trans diastereomeric cyclobutane and cyclohexane derivatives with the aim to explore the influence of the ring size as well as the relative configuration in their hierarchical self-assembly to form gels. High resolution 1H NMR spectroscopy studies allowed the determination of the dynamics of the gelation process in [D8]-toluene and the sol-gel transition temperature. The morphology and size of the aggregates have been investigated and results have shown that, in the case of cyclobutane derivatives, the cis/trans stereochemistry is not relevant for the gelation behaviour and the properties of the soft-materials obtained, but it is remarkable for cyclohexane diamides, which are better organogelators. The four compounds produce chiral aggregates despite that two of them are meso achiral molecules. We show in this work that this fact is an example of stochastic symmetry breaking induced by sonication. The self-assembly of these molecules has been modelled providing information and support about the structure and the chirality of the aggregates.
Application to the structural discrimination of small molecules containing multiple stereocenters. One-Shot determination of residual dipolar couplings.
A novel approach for the fast and efficient structural discrimination of molecules containing multiple stereochemical centers is described. A robust Jresolved HSQC experiment affording highly resolved 1JCH/1TCHsplittings along the indirect dimension and homodecoupled 1H signals in the detected dimension is proposed. The experiment enables in-situ distinction of both isotropic and anisotropic components of molecules dissolved incompressed PMMA gels, allowing a rapid and direct one-shot determination of accurate residual dipolar coupling constants from a single NMR spectrum
Access to experimentally infeasible spectra by pure-shift NMR covariance. André Fredi, Pau Nolis, Carlos Cobas and Teodor Parella. Journal of Magnetic Resonance, Volume 270, September 2016, Pages 161-168. DOI: 10.1016/j.jmr.2016.07.010
Abstract: Covariance processing is a versatile processing tool to generate synthetic NMR spectral representations without the need to acquire time-consuming experimental datasets. Here we show that even experimentally prohibited NMR spectra can be reconstructed by introducing key features of a reference 1D CHn-edited spectrum into standard 2D spectra. This general procedure is illustrated with the calculation of experimentally infeasible multiplicity-edited pure-shift NMR spectra of some very popular homonuclear (ME-psCOSY and ME-psTOCSY) and heteronuclear (ME-psHSQC-TOCSY and ME-psHMBC) experiments.
Workshop limited to 4 participants (first come, first served)
Contact person:
Silvia Lope-Piedrafita, PhD ()
This course combines a comprehensive series of lectures on the technology of Magnetic resonance spectroscopy and imaging (MRS/MRI) with hands-on laboratory sessions to provide practical demonstrations of key concepts and procedures for preclinical studies.
Whether you are considering MRI as a research tool in your lab or just would like to learn more about MRI, this workshop addresses practical aspects of experimental MRI with laboratory animals and provide valuable hands-on experience on a 7 Tesla Bruker BioSpec spectrometer.
“Mycobacteria clumping increase their capacity to damage macrophages” by C. Brambilla, M. Llorens-Fons, E. Julián, E. Noguera-Ortega, C. Tomàs-Martínez, M. Pérez-Trujillo, T. F. Byrd, F. Alcaide and M. Luquin.
The rough morphotypes of non-tuberculous mycobacteria have been associated with the most severe illnesses in humans. This idea is consistent with the fact that Mycobacterium tuberculosis presents a stable rough morphotype. Unlike smooth morphotypes, the bacilli of rough morphotypes grow close together, leaving no spaces among them and forming large aggregates (clumps). Currently, the initial interaction of macrophages with clumps remains unclear. Thus, we infected J774 macrophages with bacterial suspensions of rough morphotypes of Mycobacterium abscessus containing clumps and suspensions of smooth morphotypes, primarily containing isolated bacilli. Using confocal laser scanning microscopy and electron microscopy, we observed clumps of at least 5 rough-morphotype bacilli inside the phagocytic vesicles of macrophages at 3 hours post-infection. These clumps grew within the phagocytic vesicles, killing 100% of the macrophages at 72 hours post-infection, whereas the proliferation of macrophages infected with smooth morphotypes remained unaltered at 96 hours post-infection. Thus, macrophages phagocytose large clumps, exceeding the bactericidal capacities of these cells. Furthermore, proinflammatory cytokines and granuloma-like structures were only produced by macrophages infected with rough morphotypes. Thus, the present study provides a foundation for further studies that consider mycobacterial clumps as virulence factors.
Figure. Content of GPL and structure of mycolic acids. (A) 1-D TLC analysis of the crude lipid extracts of M. abscessus strains. (B) 1H-NMR spectra of purified mycolic acid methyl esters from M. abscessus. (C) Relative molar ratios of molecular moieties cis-db, trans-db, cis-cp and trans-cp of mycolic acid methyl esters from M. abscessus.
Abstract: Oocytes recovered from prepubertal goats are very heterogeneous in growth and grade of atresia which make them unpredictable for IVEP programs. We have observed that oocytes from prepubertal goats obtained from >3 mm follicles develop up to blastocyst stage at a similar percentage than oocytes from adult goats (18% vs 21%), suggesting that the follicle development and the follicular fluid (FF) content are more relevant to oocyte competence than the age of the donor. The aim of this study is to characterize the FF metabolomic profile from different follicular environments through a high-resolution 1H NMR-based metabolomic study. Samples of adult (n=40) and prepubertal (n=16) FF where collected by laparoscopic ovum pick-up (LOPU) and by aspiration of slaughterhouse ovaries, respectively. FF from small (< 3 mm) and large (> 3 mm) diameter follicles where pooled for each female. Multivariate ordination principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to detect patterns of sample ordination in the metabolomes. The unsupervised method clearly differed between the FF metabolomes of large and small follicles of prepubers and between the FF of preadolescent and adult individuals.
Figure. a) PCA scores plot (PC1-PC2) from 1H NMR spectral data of follicular fluid samples of preadolescent (n=16; blue dots) and adult (n=40; black dots) goats. b) PCA heat map loadings plot (PC1-PC2) with some discriminant variables assigned.
The researcher will investigate the subject “Analysis of complex mixtures by NMR spectroscopy” under the joint supervision of Dr. Teodor Parella and Dr. Míriam Pérez-Trujillo, as part of the project “Design and Application of New Methodologies in Nuclear Magnetic Resonance” (Diseño y aplicación de nuevas metodologías en resonancia magnética nuclear, CTQ2015-64436-P, 2016-2018) awarded to Dr. Teodor Parella.
This scholarship is awarded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO), through the Predoctoral Research Fellowship Program (*) and it is co-funded by the European Social Fund (ESF).
The call for applications begins September 13th, 2016, and the deadline for submissions is September 27th, 2016 at 15:00.
All information relating to the call for applications is available at the MINECO web site and at the Database of Spanish National Funding. For details or questions about the research project, contact Dr. Teodor Parella.
(*) Convocatoria de Ayudas para contratos predoctorales para la formación de doctores 2016. Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013-2016. Programa Estatal de Promoción del Talento y su Empleabilidad, Subprograma Estatal de Formación.
