Spectral aliasing: a super zoom for 2D-NMR spectra. Principles and applications

The NMR methodology based on spectral aliasing developed at the University of Geneva is reviewed. Different approaches aimed at increasing the resolution in the indirect carbon dimension of 2D heteronuclear experiments are presented with their respective advantages. Applications to HSQC, HMBC and other 2D heteronuclear experiments to the study of natural products and synthesis intermediates are shown. HSQC-based experiments for diffusion measurements, kinetics studies and titrations experiments all take advantage of spectral aliasing to reduce the experimental time from unrealistically long acquisition times to overnight experiments. The roles of computational methods such as DFT/GIAO and Logic for Structure Determination (LSD) in structure determination are discussed.