A 2008 R+D 100 award has been presented to Bruker BioSpin for its 1.7mm triple resonance NMR Microcryoprobe with breakthrough sensitivity on an active volume of only 30 microlitres
The 1.7mm MicroCryoProbe together with the MRI CryoProbe are two innovations from Bruker BioSpin selected by the independent judging panel and editors of R+D Magazine in 2008 for this prestigious award.
This novel MicroCryoProbe offers an increase in mass sensitivity of more than an order of magnitude, which makes the 1.7mm MicroCryoProbe an ideal tool for any nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) analysis with limited sample amounts, eg, natural products, drug metabolites, isolated low abundance proteins, peptides or small molecules, or difficult-to-express proteins.
Conventional room-temperature NMR microprobes with 5 and 30 microlitre volumes have become popular in areas such as natural products chemistry, drug metabolism, protein NMR and drug screening applications.
The introduction of a cryogenically cooled MicroCryoProbe is of significant importance for researchers working with very limited sample quantities, eg, natural products isolated in minute quantities from a variety of organisms, or protein samples that have been prepared in small scale expression systems.
The significant increase in sensitivity is achieved by cryogenically cooling both detection coil and preamplifier together with proprietary high-sensitivity electronics design.
For a given sample amount, a six-fold gain over a conventional 1.7mm microprobe and about a 10-14-fold gain over a conventional 5mm probe are obtained.
This can lead to a 200-fold reduction in experiment time, or alternatively it fundamentally enables NMR research with very low sample quantities that previously would simply not have been possible or practical.
"Bruker's MicroCryoProbe offers incredible mass sensitivity, and enables us to obtain data on natural product sample obtained from a single sea mollusc that we collected 15 years ago but were unable to acquire NMR data on because of insufficient sample amount.
"Now with the 1.7mm MicroCryoProbe we've solved the structures of these molecules," said Ted Molinski, professor at the Skaggs school of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences at University of California San Diego.
"Many of our customers have urged us to develop a MicroCryoProbe," said Oskar Schett, a managing director of Bruker BioSpin.
"It was clear that after the successes of both our 5mm CryoProbes and our conventional microprobes a combination of the two technologies was the next logical step to further lower the detection limits of NMR for the characterisation of many samples that were considered not measurable by NMR".
