An inexpensive high-throughput nuclear magnetic resonance tube cleaning apparatus

Large-scale nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) tube cleaning is currently a bottleneck in high-throughput NMR ligand affinity screens. Expensive alternatives include discarding the NMR tubes after a single use (~US $2-$8/tube), using commercial NMR tube cleaners (~$15,000), and abandoning NMR tubes for flow probe technology (~$75,000). Instead, we describe a relatively inexpensive (~$400) and easily constructed apparatus that can clean 180 NMR tubes per hour while using a modest amount of solvent. The application of this apparatus significantly shortens the time to recycle NMR tubes while avoiding cross-contamination and tube damage.