Friday, October 28, 2011

New NMR book

NMR Spectroscopy of Polymers: Innovative Strategies for Complex Macromolecules
ACS Symposium Series, Volume 1077
Editors: H.N. Cheng, T. Asakura, A.D. English
Publisher: ACS, October 2011
Language: English
ISBN: 978-0841226678
http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/bk-2011-1077

This ACS Symposium Series book includes papers presented at the Symposium "NMR Spectroscopy of Polymers - Innovative NMR Strategies for Complex Macromolecular Systems" which was part of Pacifichem 2010, the 2010 International Chemical Congress of Pacific Basin Societies in Honolulu, Hawaii, December 15-20, 2010. Among over 30 contributions on the state-of-the-art NMR spectroscopy in polymers and related systems there are two chapters by Canadian NMR research groups.

P.M. Macdonald, "Diffusion NMR of Polymers in Bicelles," Chapter 14, NMR Spectroscopy of Polymers: Innovative Strategies for Complex Macromolecules, Eds. H.N. Cheng, T. Asakura, A.D. English, ACS (2011) pp. 221-250. http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/bk-2011-1077.ch014

H. Thérien-Aubin, Y.J. Wang, and X.X. Zhu, "NMR Imaging and Its Application in the Study of Pharmaceutical Tablets," Chapter 27, NMR Spectroscopy of Polymers: Innovative Strategies for Complex Macromolecules, Eds. H.N. Cheng, T. Asakura, A.D. English, ACS (2011) pp. 441-457.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1021/bk-2011-1077.ch027

Sunday, October 16, 2011

Agilent Users' Meeting prior to MOOT 2011

On Friday, October 21st, 2011, Agilent Technologies will be holding a pre-MOOT Agilent users' meeting at the University of Toronto to celebrate the opening of the CSICOMP NMR Facility and to honour the career of Professor William Reynolds.

You are cordially invited to attend this event which will take place at 13:00-19:00, Sidney Smith Room SS2135, Department of Chemistry, University of Toronto. Please reserve your seat as places are limited by following this link.

Friday, October 14, 2011

MetaboHunter

D. Tulpan, S. Léger, L. Belliveau, A. Culf, M. Cuperlovic-Culf, "MetaboHunter: an automatic approach for identification of metabolites from 1H-NMR spectra of complex mixtures," BMC Bioinformatics 12 (2011) accepted. (open access)
http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/12/400/abstract

Background One-dimensional 1H-NMR spectroscopy is widely used for high-throughput characterization of metabolites in complex biological mixtures. However, the accurate identification of individual compounds is still a challenging task, particularly in spectral regions with higher peak densities. The need for automatic tools to facilitate and further improve the accuracy of such tasks, while using increasingly larger reference spectral libraries becomes a priority of current metabolomics research.


Results We introduce a web server application, called MetaboHunter, which can be used for automatic assignment of 1H-NMR spectra of metabolites. MetaboHunter provides methods for automatic metabolite identification based on spectra or peak lists with three different search methods and with possibility for peak drift in a user defined spectral range. The assignment is performed using as reference libraries manually curated data from two major publicly available databases of NMR metabolite standard measurements (HMDB and MMCD). Tests using a variety of synthetic and experimental spectra of single and multi metabolite mixtures show that MetaboHunter is able to identify, in average, more than 80% of detectable metabolites from spectra of synthetic mixtures and more than 50% from spectra corresponding to experimental mixtures. This work also suggests that better scoring functions improve by more than 30% the performance of MetaboHunter's metabolite identification methods.

Conclusions MetaboHunter is a freely accessible, easy to use and user friendly 1H-NMR-based web server application that provides efficient data input and pre-processing, flexible parameter settings, fast and automatic metabolite fingerprinting and results visualization via intuitive plotting and compound peak hit maps. Compared to other published and freely accessible metabolomics tools, MetaboHunter implements three efficient methods to search for metabolites in manually curated data from two reference libraries.

Availability http://www.nrcbioinformatics.ca/metabohunter/

Wednesday, October 12, 2011

Valerie Booth - Canada Research Chair in magnetic resonance renewed

Government of Canada has announced an investment of $203.9 million to fund 253 newly awarded or renewed Canada Research Chairs at 56 Canadian universities. This includes renewal of one Chair involved in magnetic resonance research.

Valerie Booth (Memorial University of Newfoundland) Canada Research Chair Tier 2 in Membrane Proteins. Valerie has been also awarded a complementary CFI funding under the Leaders Opportunity Fund. Congratulations!

Friday, October 7, 2011

Recognition: Brian Sykes

Brian Sykes, a Distinguished University Professor in the Department of Biochemistry, University of Alberta, has won the 2010 University of Alberta Cup. The University Cup is among the highest honors that the University of Alberta confers on its faculty members. It is awarded in recognition of faculty members who have clearly excelled in both teaching and research. Prof. Sykes was presented with the University Cup at the 2011 Celebrate! ceremony, the university’s annual celebration of teaching, learning and research, held on September 16, 2011 (read the news story).

Monday, October 3, 2011

NMR Winter School at Saclay

Experiments and Modelling in Structural NMR

November 28 -December 2, 2011
INSTN-CEA Saclay, France (20 km South of Paris)

http://www-instn.cea.fr/-2011-Events-.html#NMR

The aim of the school is to provide basic understanding on the coupling of theoretical Modelling and Simulation methods to the Experiments in structural NMR, for biology and material science. This school will therefore cover liquid, oriented media and solid state NMR approaches.

The School is composed of Seminars in the morning and Practical Training in the afternoon involving both the theoretical and experimental aspects.

The school will cover several topics in the field of structural NMR. In the first part, following an introduction on general principles, the basic knowledge in isotropic and anisotropic media is given. The second part deals with the structural studies of biological systems and materials while the third gives an overview of a some advanced concepts including Hyper-polarization, Fast NMR and Diffusion process.

This school is a unique, covering most recent aspects of Structural NMR , in biology and material science, both experimental and computational.

Registration deadline: October 30, 2011