Valeria Righi1, Ovidiu C. Andronesi1, Dionyssios Mintzopoulos1, A. Aria Tzika1
1NMR Surgical Laboratory, MGH & Shriners Hospitals, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA
We propose a solid-state NMR method that maximizes the advantages of high-resolution magic-angle-spinning (HRMAS) applied to intact biopsies when compared to more conventional liquid-state NMR approaches. Numerical simulations and experimental results on skeletal muscle specimens from burn trauma are presented. Experimentally, it is shown that an optimized adiabatic TOBSY (TOtal through Bond correlation SpectroscopY) solid-state NMR pulse sequence for two-dimensional 1H-1H homonuclear scalar-coupling longitudinal isotropic mixing provides a 50-60% improvement in signal-to-noise ratio relative to its liquid-state analogue TOCSY (TOtal Correlation SpectroscopY). We demonstrate a concept for HRMAS metabolic profiling of burn trauma, from biopsies requiring reduced sample degradation for further genomic analysis.