¹⁷O NMR spectroscopy as a tool to study hydrogen bonding of cholesterol in lipid bilayers

Heteronuclear single-quantum correlation spectroscopy (HSQC) is a 2D NMR technique that reveals one-bond correlations between hydrogen and a heteronucleus. The HSQC experiment is similar to the heteronuclear correlation experiment (HETCOR) but is more sensitive. In the HSQC spectrum, the proton chemical shift is plotted on the horizontal F2 axis, while the 13C chemical shift is plotted on the vertical F1 axis. The corresponding proton and 13C spectra are also shown. The HSQC contour plot does...

The axial and equatorial protons in cyclohexane can be distinguished by performing a variable-temperature NMR experiment. In this process, except for one proton, the remaining eleven protons are replaced by deuterium. The deuterium substitution avoids the possible peak splitting caused by the spin-spin coupling between the adjacent protons. The remaining proton flips between the axial and equatorial positions.

Heteronuclear correlation spectroscopy is an analytical technique that investigates the coupling between different types of nuclei, often a proton and an X-nucleus, such as carbon-13 or nitrogen-15. This method is commonly used in nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy to gain insights into complex chemical compounds' structural and compositional aspects. A typical heteronuclear correlation spectrum displays X-nucleus chemical shifts on one axis and a proton spectrum on the other...

This lesson illustrates the role of deuterium substitution in simplifying the NMR spectrum of compounds comprising labile protons. One method employed is the use of deuterium. Amongst the three isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium (2H) has a nucleus composed of one proton and one neutron. When the D2O solvent is added to a pure dry ethanol solution, its labile proton is substituted with deuterium.

At room temperature, the chair conformer of cyclohexane undergoes rapid ring flipping between two equivalent chair conformers at a rate of approximately 105 times per second. These two chair conformers are in equilibrium. The rapid ring flipping results in the interconversion of the axial proton to an equatorial proton and an equatorial to the axial proton. Such interconversions are too rapid and cannot be detected on the NMR timescale. Hence, the NMR spectrometer cannot distinguish between the...

Organic molecules primarily contain carbon and hydrogen atoms. While all the hydrogen isotopes are NMR-active, protium or hydrogen-1 is the most abundant. It has a significant energy separation between its nuclear spin states due to its large gyromagnetic ratio. As per Boltzmann's distribution, an increase in the energy separation implies a greater excess population of nuclei available for excitation, resulting in a strong NMR absorption signal.
Absorption signals of all the protium nuclei...