High magnetic fields reveal atom-level structures of drugs, materials
A tiny, solid sample of a drug, complete with active and inactive ingredients, spun at 50,000 revolutions per second while tilted at the “magic angle” of nearly 55 degrees relative to a high magnetic field.
A special instrument at the National Magnetic Resonance Facility at the University of Wisconsin-Madison produced all that spinning and angling so researchers could probe the nuclei of the sample’s atoms. Some 270 miles away, the real-time results showed up as a blue line on the desktop computer of Aaron Rossini, a chemistry professor at Iowa State University and a faculty scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory.
That blue line showed several peaks of varying intensity and position. The position of these peaks offered clues about the structure of the solid drug, helping to locate the position of the hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms.
