Taking advantage of the high NMR detection sensitivity and the large chemical shift dispersion offered by ultra-high field strength of 7 T, the effect of magnetization transfer on inorganic phosphate (Pi) resonance during saturation of ␥-ATP resonance, mediated by the ATP synthesis reaction, was observed noninvasively in the human primary visual cortex by using in vivo 31 P magnetic resonance spectroscopy. The unidirectional flux from Pi to ATP was measured by using progressive saturation transfer experiments. The cerebral ATP synthesis rate in the human primary visual cortex measured by 31 P magnetic resonance spectroscopy in this study was 12.1 ؎ 2.8 mol ATP͞g per min, which agreed well with the value that was calculated indirectly from the cerebral metabolic rate of glucose consumption reported previously. E nergy requirements in tissues are met predominantly through hydrolysis of the high-energy molecule ATP. In the brain, this molecule is synthesized almost exclusively by mitochondrial oxidative phosphorylation, with only a small contribution coming from nonoxidative glycolysis (1). Despite the critical role of ATP in cellular functions, the kinetics of ATP synthesis and hydrolysis is often difficult to measure directly in intact cells and even more so in intact animals and humans. Cerebral ATP synthesis rate has been calculated indirectly from experimentally measured cerebral metabolic rates of glucose (CMR glu ) and oxygen (CMRO 2 ) (1, 2), and it has been estimated to be Ϸ14 mol ATP͞g per min (2) in the resting human brain.The magnetization transfer (MT) technique based on magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) has the capability of measuring the reaction kinetics of enzymes noninvasively in situ when the reaction rates involved are relatively fast (e.g., for review see refs. 3 and 4). Using this technique to study the kinetics of ATP synthesis in biological tissues with 31 P MRS was first introduced in the late 1970s in suspensions of Escherichia coli cells (5). Since then, it has been applied to yeast (6), intact perfused hearts (4, 7-11), liver (12), kidney (13), canine myocardium in vivo (14), skeletal muscle (15), and rat brain (16). It was demonstrated that, under appropriate conditions, the MT technique is capable of measuring the net rate of oxidative ATP synthesis catalyzed by mitochondrial ATPase (7-10); because, by definition, this rate is proportional to the oxygen consumption rate by the P͞O ratio, those experiments yielded for the first time the P͞O ratio in an intact organ under functional conditions.Because of the relatively low concentration of P i in normal intact tissues and the low intrinsic detection sensitivity of in vivo 31 P MRS, virtually all previous experiments using the MT methodology to study P i -ATP exchange were performed in excised perfused organ models or in small animals, where the radio frequency coil geometry relative to the organ of interest can be optimized to yield significant gains in signal-to-noise ratio compared with what is possible in humans. In addition, all ...