Skip To Content

ACD/Labs Blog

Arvin Moser
For synthetic reactions where rearrangement, derivatization, or cyclization has occurred, a common task is to compare the NMR spectra between the starting material and the product. The similar peaks indicate a structural region where change has not occurred whereas the unique peaks indicate a region where change has occurred. Arguably, this becomes a peak mapping...

Arvin Moser
Carbon peaks that overlap on an 1H -13C HMBC experiment can be tricky to deal with especially when additional experiments do not help to clarify the situation. A good approach is to keep note of any high correlation counts for a carbon resonance, and subsequently, treat the carbon resonance as possibly multiple carbons with coincidental...

Arvin Moser
When the incorrect number of directly-bonded protons are assigned to carbons, the elucidator is left with extra protons. (This can happen in situations with a highly-crowded region on a 1H NMR spectrum.) Where possible, tallying the expected number of exchangeable protons can serve as a warning flag that something is amiss. The following carbons, shown...

Arvin Moser
The 1H-13C HMQC, HSQC, DEPT-HSQC, HSQC-TOCSY and HETCOR experiments offer the elucidator information on the proton-carbon connectivity. The interpretation process comes down to 3 basic assignments: the correlation belongs to a methyl, methylene or methine carbon. A methyl or methine carbon exhibits at most a single correlation between the 1H and 13C axes. A methylene...

Ryan Sasaki
A few months back, I referenced Derek Lowe’s excellent blog, "In the Pipeline" Some of the most interesting entries for me are: Backtracking, Necessary, and UnnecessaryI Can Has Ugly Molecules? Oops. One of the take home messages for me, is when Derek says, "False Negatives and False Positives are waiting in your dataset, depend on...

Arvin Moser
In NMR, nuclei can be classified as isochronous or anisochronous. “Where diastereotopic protons show the same chemical shift, they are said to be accidentally equivalent or isochronous, and where they have different chemical shifts the protons are described as anisochronous.” Stereochemistry by David G. Morris, Royal Society of Chemistry (Great Britain) Published by Royal Society...

Ryan Sasaki
I’ve been away for the better part of the last few months, haven’t been able to spend anytime blogging, and I apologize for those of you who have subscribed to the blog and anticipate hearing from me on a regular basis. During my travels I have had a lot of discussions about ACD/1D NMR Assistant...

Arvin Moser
The progression of a structure elucidation process is to examine the experimental data, compare the results to literature if possible, build a set of fragments based on the available data and finally assemble the fragments until a candidate structure(s) is reached. The assembly part is very much like working on a jigsaw puzzle. When all...

Arvin Moser
In electrospray ionization MS (ESI-MS), ions are produced by the addition of a proton ([M+H]+). However, in cases where the analyte molecule is already charged, e.g. quaternary amine salts, the resulting ion may be an M+ ion. Two ESI+ mass spectra are shown below. To test whether the molecular ion is M+ or M+H+, deuterium...

Arvin Moser
The underlying essence of a structure elucidation process is to structurally distinguish an unknown from a set of possible isomers. This is evident by the number of possible isomers for a given molecular formula. The chart below divides isomers into two groups: Structural/Constitutional/Regio and Stereo/Spatial isomers. Wikipedia links are included for further reading into the...