Journal article icon

Journal article

Seedless: on-the-fly pulse calculation for NMR experiments

Abstract:
NMR experiments require sequences of radio frequency (RF) pulses to manipulate nuclear spins. Signal is lost due to non-uniform excitation of nuclear spins resonating at different energies (chemical shifts) and inhomogeneity in the RF unavoidably generated by hardware over the sample volume. To overcome this, we present Seedless, a tool to calculate NMR pulses that compensate for these effects to enhance control of magnetisation and boost signal. As calculations take only a few seconds using an optimised GRadient Ascent Pulse Engineering (GRAPE) implementation, this now allows pulses to be generated in a few seconds, allowing them to be optimised for individual samples and spectrometers (“on-the-fly”). Each calculated pulse requires bands of chemical shift to be identified, over which one of 4 transforms will be performed, selected from a set that covers all commonly used applications. Using imaging experiments, we demonstrate our pulses effectively both increase the size of the coil volume and signal-to-noise in all experiments. We illustrate the approach by showing sensitivity gains in 1, 2 and 3D applications suitable for chemical and biological NMR. Seedless provides a means to enhance sensitivity in all pulse sequences in a manner that can be tailored to different samples and hardware being used.
Publication status:
Published
Peer review status:
Peer reviewed

Actions

Access Document

Publisher copy:
10.1038/s41467-025-61663-8

Authors

More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Chemistry
Sub department:
Sub-Department of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Physics
Research group:
Centre for Quantum Computation
Role:
Author
ORCID:
0000-0002-8300-9822
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MPLS
Department:
Chemistry
Sub department:
Sub-Department of Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MSD
Department:
NDM
Research group:
Kavli Institute of Nanoscience Discovery
Role:
Author
More by this author
Institution:
University of Oxford
Division:
MSD
Department:
Pharmacology
Role:
Author


More from this funder
Funder identifier:
https://ror.org/0472cxd90
Grant:
101002859
More from this funder
Funder identifier:
https://ror.org/00k4n6c32


Publisher:
Springer Nature
Journal:
Nature Communications More from this journal
Volume:
16
Issue:
1
Article number:
7276
Place of publication:
England
Publication date:
2025-08-07
Acceptance date:
2025-06-27
DOI:
EISSN:
2041-1723
Pmid:
40775231


Language:
English
Pubs id:
2277689
Local pid:
pubs:2277689
Deposit date:
2025-08-21
ARK identifier:

Terms of use


Views and Downloads






If you are the owner of this record, you can report an update to it here: Report update to this record

TO TOP