Bruker highlights innovative NMR capabilities and products at ENC 2019

At ENC 2019, Bruker highlights innovative NMR capabilities and products for biomolecular, materials research and pharmaceutical applications, as well as new scientific software solutions.

Dr. Falko Busse, Bruker BioSpin's Group President, stated:

Our new NMR instruments and solutions at ENC 2019 demonstrate the diversity and flexibility that Bruker brings to the world of magnetic resonance. Bruker is committed to providing the best solutions to meet the requirements of our customers and support their experimental endeavors, and that includes increasing our presence in laboratory software and applied solutions."

New NMR iProbe and CryoProbe Products

First launched in 2017, the iProbe^™ generation of room-temperature NMR probes is now expanded further by the introduction of the easy-to-use, robust iProbe CP-MAS. Designed to support automated workflows, the iProbe CP-MAS features automated magic angle calibration, auto-tuning and matching for solid-state magic angle spinning (MAS) experiments, as well as support for sample changers. The new iProbe CP‑MAS offers optimized results in automation, and is available for 400, 500 and 600 MHz systems in double-resonance H/X channel configurations with 4.0 mm rotor diameter for MAS up to 15 kHz.

Bruker is also introducing a novel iProbe^™ TBO, a higher-sensitivity, true triple-resonance broadband NMR probe designed for the study of fluorinated compounds in pharma, polymer and biological sciences. The iProbe TBO can observe any nucleus in the range from 31 P to 109 Ag with simultaneous decoupling on 1H and 19F, and thus eliminates the need for probe changes. The addition of 19F to the successful iProbe platform results in no compromise for heteronuclei and virtually no loss on proton sensitivity, but with at least 50% higher 1H and 19F sensitivity for true triple-resonance H/F/X experiments, compared to other probe technologies. Auto-tuning and matching capability allows liquids NMR automation. The iProbe TBO was designed for observation and decoupling over the entire 19F chemical shift range without compromise, a key advantage for the analysis of fluorinated compounds of high importance in pharma.

The new BioSolids CryoProbe^™ is the latest introduction in the successful CryoProbe platform, optimized for biological solids, such as membrane proteins or disease aggregates at physiological temperatures. A boost in x-nucleus sensitivity by a factor of up to 4 reduces experiment time by a factor of up to sixteen. The BioSolids CryoProbe is available for 600 MHz systems in H/C/N configuration and supports high-power decoupling as well as CP and double CP based solid-state NMR experiments.

New Scientific and Laboratory Software and Workflows

Bruker and Mestrelab Expand Software Solutions Portfolio for applied NMR: The laboratory of tomorrow requires the integration of multiple technology platforms, e.g. NMR, mass spectrometry and infrared spectroscopy. The strategic collaboration of Mestrelab and Bruker is expected to provide a simple, instrument-to-result automation environment that allows users to build automated solutions tailored to their workflow, from Bruker NMR acquisition and processing to various Bruker and MestreLab chemical knowledge extraction and management solutions.

The first result of this partnership is the newly developed BiologicsHOS software, which provides an efficient workflow for evaluating the higher order structure fingerprint of proteins in biopharmaceutical research. BiologicsHOS uses advances in data acquisition and analysis to characterize intact biopharmaceuticals at natural abundance, using both 1D and 2D NMR methods. Because of its intrinsically high information content, NMR is proving to be a uniquely valuable tool in the validation of HOS, reducing the number of techniques needed to characterize biologics and biosimilars.

A second example is the integration of Bruker’s Fragment-Based Screening (FBS) solution with Mestrelab’s MScreen software, which provides drug discovery groups with an integrated experience from data acquisition and analysis to the identification of hits in FBS-by-NMR campaigns.

Intelligent NMR Spectrometer Initiative

Bruker is continuing to advance the Intelligent NMR Spectrometer framework at ENC 2019 for ease of use, lower training requirements and higher productivity.

The new SmartDriveNMR acquisition tool utilizes a fast scout experiment along with all other user inputs, and determines if follow-up experiments are beneficial, in which case optimized further experiments are carried out in automation within the time limits set by the user. The NMR experiment portfolio includes heteronuclear 2D experiments including HSQCs and HMBCs, 1D 13C and a variety of different types of solvent suppression schemes for 1D 1H experiments. Non-Uniform Sampling (NUS) data acquisition and Signal-to-Noise optimization ensure data quality, and an automatic structure verification (ASV) is completed as an integrated part of SmartDriveNMR.

Automatic calibration for the Intelligent NMR Spectrometer is now offered by the new AutoCalibrate^™ capabilitiy, which determines the optimal settings for key NMR parameters, logs results and monitors changes. AutoCalibrate is key to maintaining well-tuned NMR spectrometers, tracking changes and monitoring the long-term performance and health of the entire system.

Deep Learning Applications in NMR Spectroscopy is part of our work-in-progress project around Deep Neural Networks (DNNs). It now enables interested beta customers to use supervised learning, e.g. for the automatic detection of signal regions in 1D 1H NMR spectra. The deep neural network was trained on two million spectra that were simulated with artificial noise and other artifacts from publically available structures.

New NMR Automation Product

The new SampleCase^™ Plus provides easy, safe and convenient access at the user height level for 60 easily accessed sample positions. It is a random-access, automated accessory that fits all Bruker standard-bore magnets from 300-900 MHz, and is compatible with TopSpin^™ and IconNMR^™ software.