Towards MRS using High-Resolution Magic-Angle Coil Spinning: application to brain metabolism

High-Resolution Magic-Angle sample Spinning (HR-MAS) NMR spectroscopy of biopsies combined with chemometric statistical tools has now emerged as a powerful methodology for metabolomics NMR and has led to many important disease diagnosis, therapeutic target discovery and environmental assessment. This technique is also a method of choice when studying metabolism. However, due to the intrinsically poor detection sensitivity, NMR analysis often requires large tissue mass (5 to 10 mg). Such mass could compromise the metabolic evaluation due to the high degree of tissue heterogeneity (in tumor for example). Unfortunately, today there are no practical means for NMR analysis of small quantity of tissue, or any soft-matter, where sample magic-angle spinning is essential for high quality data acquisition. For this reason, we are developing NMR-based analytical tools with good sensitivity and with good metabolic spectral quality for nanogram tissue biopsies1. Currently, one promising approach is the used of a simple micro-resonator (High-Resolution Magic-Angle Coil Spinning (MACS)), in which it can wirelessly coupled to a MAS probe. Here, we present the use of this micro-resonator High-Resolution (HR)MACS to explore rat brain metabolism, and to see if it was possible to detect and discriminate any differential biomarkers between rest and activated rat brain.

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