Mid-scale RI-2 Consortium: Network for Advanced NMR

Nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy (NMR) is an essential tool for research into molecular structures and dynamics. This award will support the establishment of a geographically distributed Network for Advanced NMR (NAN) in the U.S. to provide ultra-high field NMR spectrometers to allow users to tackle important and diverse scientific problems and to educate and train the next generation of scientists and engineers.

Scientific research areas enabled by these systems cover a wide range of problems in structural biology, dynamics and function of different biological systems from molecules to whole cells and tissues, complex mixtures, metabolomics, and natural products. Non-biological applications include, but are not limited to, amorphous materials, battery components, pharmaceutical ingredients, nanomaterials, surface coatings, and catalysts.

User support and training will be provided through community outreach and an extensive “KnowledgeBase” of online tutorials, protocols, NMR pulse sequences, and additional technical materials. Remote users at any institution will be able to bring or send their samples to take advantage of NAN resources. Targeted outreach to undergraduate and minority serving institutions will promote broadening participation in the NMR research community.

In combination, the enhanced cyberinfrastructure and new instruments will help to address a national deficit in high-field NMR capacity. Training and enabling more researchers and new transformative research will serve the NSF mission priority to advance all fields of science and engineering.

The NAN will operate by a hub and spoke model that dynamically adapts to meet evolving community needs. The hub at the University of Connecticut will facilitate access to state-of-the-art NMR instrumentation, experimental protocols, and experts by US researchers. Existing cyberinfrastructure will be leveraged and expanded to serve the storage, analysis, and data-reuse needs for a large community of researchers.

The project also includes plans to purchase two 1.1 GHz NMR spectrometers for installation at the NAN spoke locations. One system will be installed at University of Wisconsin for solid-state NMR research. The second system will be installed at the University of Georgia and be dedicated to solution NMR studies.

Additional locations will be added as the NAN expands to incorporate more member locations with existing instrumentation in the U.S. Significant efforts will be directed toward the advancement of NMR technology, including improvements for spectral sensitivity, resolution, relaxation dynamics, indirect detection, sampling, machine learning and other methods.

Once established, the NAN will operate with tiered support levels to both enable and support U.S. researchers seeking to use the new 1.1 Ghz high-field NMR systems or one of the 21 other NMR 300-900 MHz instruments available at other locations. Improved and distributed utilization of this large complement of NMR systems is a key benefit of the NAN.

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.