NMR techniques in studying water in biotechnological systems

Abstract

Different NMR methodologies have been considered in studying water as a part of the structure of heterogeneous biosystems. The current work mostly describes NMR techniques to investigate slow translational dynamics of molecules affecting anisotropic properties of polymers and biomaterials. With these approaches, information about organized structures and their stability could be obtained in conditions when external factors affect biomolecules. Such changes might include rearrangement of macromolecular conformations at fabrication of nano-scaffolds for tissue engineering applications. The changes in water-fiber interactions could be mirrored by the magnetic resonance methods in various relaxations, double-quantum filtered (DQF), 1D and 2D translational diffusion experiments. These findings effectively demonstrate the current state of NMR studies in applying these experiments to the various systems with the anisotropic properties. For fibrous materials, it is shown how NMR correlation experiments with two gradients (orthogonal or collinear) encode diffusion coefficients in anisotropic materials and how to estimate the permeability of cell walls. It is considered how the DQF NMR technique discovers anisotropic water in natural polymers with various cross-links. The findings clarify hydration sites, dynamic properties, and binding of macromolecules discovering the role of specific states in improving scaffold characteristics in tissue engineering processes. Showing the results in developing these NMR tools, this review focuses on the ways of extracting information about biophysical properties of biomaterials from the NMR data obtained.

Solid State NMR Spectroscopy a Valuable Technique for Structural Insights of Advanced Thin Film Materials: A Review

“…Solid-state NMR has established its position in different fields of science, starting from inorganic materials such as zeolites [205], inorganic polymers [206] and boranephosphane [207] passing through biological [208] and biotechnological systems [209] such as carbohydrates [210], proteins [211], biomembranes [212] and plant cell wall [213], environmental chemistry [214], and ending up with material science, including metal organic frameworks [215], perovskites [216], organic semiconductors [217] and functional nanomaterials [218]. Solid-state NMR spectroscopy, with its diverse techniques and measured nuclei, offers a wide range of valuable information on the geometric and electronic structure of advanced thin-film materials.…”