A high-resolution 2D J-resolved NMR detection technique for metabolite analyses of biological samples

Abstract

NMR spectroscopy is a commonly used technique for metabolite analyses. Due to the observed macroscopic magnetic susceptibility in biological tissues, current NMR acquisitions in measurements of biological tissues are generally performed on tissue extracts using liquid NMR or on tissues using magic-angle spinning techniques. In this study, we propose an NMR method to achieve high-resolution J-resolved information for metabolite analyses directly from intact biological samples. A dramatic improvement in spectral resolution is evident in our contrastive demonstrations on a sample of pig brain tissue. Metabolite analyses for a postmortem fish from fresh to decayed statuses are presented to further reveal the capability of the proposed method. This method is a previously-unreported high-resolution 2D J-resolved spectroscopy for biological applications without specialised hardware requirements or complicated sample pretreatments. It provides a significant contribution to metabolite analyses of biological samples, and may be potentially applicable to in vivo samples. Furthermore, this method also can be applied to measurements of semisolid and viscous samples.