Internal temperature calibration for 1H NMR spectroscopy studies of blood plasma and other biofluids

A method for temperature calibration of human blood plasma and cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples inside a high resolution NMR spectrometer is presented. This calibration is based on the temperature dependence of the chemical shift difference between the water signal and that from the H-1 proton of endogenous alpha-glucose or, in some circumstances, beta-glucose. This dependence can be fitted using a second-order polynomial equation and functions for both human blood plasma and human CSF are given. Similar graphs could easily be generated for other fluids. The blood plasma calibration appears to be accurate to +/- 0.9 K in test samples. The use of the blood plasma calibration graph has also been evaluated using the 1H NMR spectra of CSF and shown to overestimate the CSF internal temperature by ca 1.3 K. This approach should have a general applicability to blood plasma and CSF samples from normal and pathological situations or from other species, because there are unlikely to be large changes in ionic strength or pH even in disease states. Knowledge of the exact internal temperature of plasma samples is likely to be of particular importance in the investigation of lipid and lipoprotein interactions because of the significant temperature dependence of lipid and lipoprotein NMR linewidths in such samples.