Articles

Mathieu Duval raises the question “Dating fossil teeth by electron paramagnetic resonance: how is that possible?”. Whilst we are all familiar with ¹⁴C dating, the use of EPR is less well known. In fact, there are less than 10 laboratories in the world able to carry out EPR dating of fossil teeth!

Many analytical methods have been used to control the quality, authenticity and origin of fresh fruit. NMR methodologies yield a comprehensive metabolic profile, provide direct structural information regarding individual metabolites in the mixture and also give information regarding the water state in the tissue. This is useful in discriminating various fruits varieties, in investigating nutritional properties, in monitoring the development of the fruit and in assessing the optimum harvesting time.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one of the most powerful analytical tools used to probe details of molecular structure and dynamics. It requires very high magnetic fields and, hence, generally uses extremely large, powerful magnets. The advent of small, powerful magnets has allowed much less expensive low resolution NMR instrumentation to be designed, making it feasible to measure commercially important characteristics of dispersion behaviour and performance, including the wetted surface area of particulate suspensions and emulsion droplet size. An important additional practical application is the ability to determine competitive adsorption and/or displacement of polymers and surfactants at interfaces. This article presents a brief overview of these new approaches together with an example of each measurement.

Dirk Lachenmeier, Marina Gary, Yulia Monakhova, Thomas Kuballa and Gerd Mildau describe “Rapid NMR screening of total aldehydes to detect oxidative rancidity in vegetable oils and decorative cosmetics”. Lipid oxidation produces rancid products, which are both unpleasant and potentially toxic. The authors describe the use of NMR to screen food and cosmetic products. Whilst, vegetable oils were generally found to be in good condition, German women may wish to be careful of their lipstick, especially if they have had kept it for a while!

This article outlines the use of the DOSY NMR method applied to drug analysis and screening for counterfeit drugs or fake herbal medicines

There has been much debate about which program can predict NMR spectra the best. It is well known within the NMR community that spectra prediction strongly depends on the “quality” of the starting data sets for those systems which use real data as a knowledge base. It has become a hot topic in some blogs, although disappointingly most of the authors tend to have affiliations to one software vendor or another.

Our focus here is analytical procedures and the role of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) in particular. These have, until now, largely relied on conventional chromatography, and vibrational spectroscopy—infrared (IR), Raman and near infrared (NIR) spectroscopy. In spite of inherent difficulties with peak assignment and reliable quantification, vibrational spectroscopy has been used to derive information on reaction progression to impart fundamental understanding. This article sets out a wider scope to show how NMR can play a key role. Furthermore, NMR integrates well with established procedures to provide a suite of useful technologies that make the PAT challenge tractable.

Raymond J. Abraham and Mehdi Mobli

Chemistry Department, The University of Liverpool, PO Box 147, Liverpool L69 3BX, UK

Luisa Mannina,^a,b Anatoli P. Sobolev^b and Annalaura Segre^b

^aUniversity of Molise, Faculty of Agriculture, 86100 Campobasso, Italy
^bInstitute of Chemical Methodologies, CNR, 00016 Monterotondo Staz., Rome, Italy