A method for acquiring pure shift heteronuclear single quantum correlation (HSQC) NMR spectra in real time is described. A windowed acquisition scheme consisting of trains of bilinear rotation decoupling (BIRD) [1,2] refocusing elements is used to acquire chunks of data with refocused J HH modulation while suppressing J XH with broadband heteronuclear decoupling. The resultant spectra show both enhanced resolution in F 2 and enhanced signal-to-noise ratio.Scalar spin-spin (J) coupling provides valuable information for molecular structure elucidation, but the multiplet structure it causes is very expensive in terms of spectral resolution. In 1 H NMR spectroscopy, multiplets are often many times the width of a single line. It is routine to suppress heteronuclear couplings (J XH ) by broadband decoupling, [3][4][5][6][7] but only recently have experimental methods for homonuclear broadband decoupling become practical. These "pure shift" or "chemical-shift resolved" or "d-resolved" methods [8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19] can give resolution improvements approaching an order of magnitude, far in excess of any gains to be realistically expected from increases in the static magnetic field. However, all of these methods suffer to a greater or lesser extent from reduced sensitivity compared to conventional measurements. Here we describe an experimental method for obtaining pure shift heteronuclear single quantum correlation (HSQC) spectra, in which real-time homodecoupling using the BIRD pulse sequence element [1] leads to the first simultaneous resolution and signal enhancement in the directly detected ( 1 H) dimension. (Homodecoupling has previously been described for the HSQC experiment, but only in the indirect ( 13 C) dimension. [20] )The HSQC experiment is the most widely used NMR method for correlating the chemical shifts of directly-bonded 13 C-1 H pairs. In its conventional [21] form, it shows proton multiplet structure in F 2 , which limits resolution in the spectra of complex species. It has recently been shown [17,22,23] that it is possible to extend the pure shift methods currently used, which rely on stitching together separate measurements of short periods of decoupled signal, to real-time acquisition, in which homonuclear couplings are periodically refocused, by applying appropriate spin manipulations during the acquisition of a single free-induction decay. Such J-refocusing sequence elements are generally designed to be broadband, as distinct from classical selective [24,25] or band-selective [26] homodecoupling; in the case of HSQC, J-refocusing uses a BIRD pulse sequence element and a hard (nonselective) 1808 pulse. The BIRD sequence element, [1] which, as its name suggests, was originally intended for broadband homonuclear decoupling, has, until recently, [12] been used almost exclusively for decoupling in the indirect dimension of heteronuclear 2D experiments. [27] Here, the combined effect of the BIRD sequence and the hard 1808 pulse is to invert only those protons not directly couple...