Diagonal free homonuclear correlation using heteronuclei at natural abundance

Homonuclear correlated spectroscopy such as COSY and TOCSY provides crucial structural information. In all homonuclear correlation, the most intense peaks are represented by the diagonal. As a result, the useful cross peaks close to the diagonal get obscured by the huge tails of diagonal peaks. Herein, we show that by editing the proton magnetization by a 13C nucleus in natural abundance, it is possible to eliminate the inphase coherence or untransferred magnetization that leads to the diagonal peak while retaining the antiphase coherence or transferred magnetization required for creation of cross peak. After the coherence transfer step, the untransferred magnetization directly attached to 13C evolves under one bond heteronuclear coupling while the transferred transverse magnetization directly attached to remote 12C does not. As a result, the untransferred magnetization directly attached to 13C can be converted to an unobservable heteronuclear multiple quantum coherence leading to a diagonal free correlated spectrum with a sensitivity penalty of two orders of magnitude but comparable to HSQC kind of experiments at natural abundance. The method demonstrated for COSY and TOCSY allows all proton-proton correlations to be observed except the geminal proton-proton correlations. Further, protons directly attached to heteronuclei other than 13C must be scalar coupled to protons directly attached to 13C to have a detectable cross peak.