Search

This article describes the work of Thomas Szyperski, who adapted nuclear magnetic resonance techniques to map a protein's atomic structure more effectively. Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) is a laboratory technique that uses magnetic fields and radio-frequency pulses to identify and locate the atoms in molecules. As a way to analyze proteins, NMR has always taken a backseat to x-ray crystallography and other methods because it is slow: picking out the connections between individual atoms in a large protein involves going through the results from thousands of radio-frequency spectra, which can take up to a week. But in January, Thomas Szyperski published a paper in the Journal of the American Chemical Society describing G-matrix Fourier Transform NMR, a new method to collect data gleaned from radio-frequency pulses. Szyperski is the inventor of this technique, which improves the way NMR data are analyzed.