Bio-DNP Design Study
Summary of Project Progress
Several promising results have been achieved at the end of the second project year, demonstrating the potential of DNP for liquid state applications. These results are on schedule and compared to the effort of other DNP initiatives at the forefront of the scientific community. A special issue on DNP will be published in Applied Magnetic Resonance in July 2008. The 26 articles in this special issue (with 8 contributions from our consortium) cover the whole range of DNP applications: solids and liquids, imaging and spectroscopy, applications ranging from physics, chemistry and biology to medicine.
The main deliverables of our project after two years: two DNP spectrometers (Shuttle-DNP and HF-DNP) were both finished on schedule. Both setups show DNP enhancements and demonstrate the potential feasibility on liquid- state DNP applications. The DNP spectrometers will be further improved and optimized, parallel to first applications which are scheduled to start this year.
Parallel to the technical constructions of the two DNP setups, successful efforts have been made to understand and optimize polarization transfer mechanism and paramagnetic agents for DNP.
A number of different biomolecules have been investigated by NMR and EPR methods by all groups in the consortium. The characterization of the electron spin and nuclear spin properties is a prerequisite for their investigation by DNP, which is scheduled for the last two period of the project. The biomolecules cover soluble and membrane proteins and oligonucleotides, paramagnetic and spin labelled diamagnetic proteins. Therefore a large scaffold of potential targets are ready to test the applicability of the DNP approach for biomolecular structure studies.
In 2008 the results of DS4 and DS5 will be applied to the both spectrometers of DS2 and DS3. Enhanced DNP performance is expected from that non-trivial implementation.