Welcome to the NMR tutorials

For additional information about the Structural Biology Platform, visit our website.

To reserve time on one of our NMR spectrometer, please fill up this form and send it to the Structural Biology Platform manager, Normand Cyr, by email.

What is NMR?

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a spectroscopic approach to observe local magnetic fields around certain nuclei being intrinsically magnetic. The NMR signals are generated by exciting nuclei with radio frequencies while being submitted to an external magnetic field. This is typically done in aqueous solution, but can also be performed with solid samples (see solid-state NMR).

Sample insertion in the NMR spectrometer

More specifically, in structural biology, it is a method used for the determination of the three-dimensional molecular structure and dynamics of proteins and nucleic acids at atomic resolution. The results obtained from these measurements provide information about:

Among the techniques used to determine the structure of biomolecules at atomic resolution, NMR spectroscopy offers certain unique advantages, including (i) the possibility to study the dynamics of biomolecular folding and internal mobility over a wide range of timescales (from pico- to millisecond) and (ii) the capability to investigate intra- and intermolecular interactions under physiological conditions (Sugiki et al 2017).

Tutorial sections

References for this tutorial

Demonstration data

If you would like to explore this tutorial with demonstration data, you can download these datasets:

Web sites

Software required

The instructions on how to install individual softwares on your personal computer are details on their respective websites.

You also need to get the latest updates available from ccpNMR Analysis further down on their website.

Alternatively, the Structural Biology Platform has computers available where recent versions of these softwares are installed (TopSpin is only available on the computers controlling the spectrometers). Access to the computer room is controlled by access codes. Contact Normand Cyr in order to obtain a code.

Scientific literature