Bruker BioSpin Announces Novel 1.7mm Micro-CryoProbe for Greater than Tenfold Jump in NMR Sensitivity for Small Sample Amounts

At Pittcon 2007, Bruker BioSpin announced a new breakthrough development in its successful CryoProbe™ series, a 1.7 mm triple- resonance Micro-CryoProbe with an active volume of 30 microliters. This novel Micro-CryoProbe offers an increase in mass sensitivity of more than an order of magnitude.

This extreme sensitivity jump makes the 1.7 mm Micro-CryoProbe an ideal tool for any NMR analysis with limited sample amounts, e.g. natural products, isolated low abundance proteins, peptides or small molecules, or difficult-to-express proteins.

Conventional microprobes with 5 and 30 micro liter volumes have become very popular in areas such as natural products chemistry, protein NMR and drug screening applications. The introduction of a cryogenically cooled Micro-CryoProbe is of significant importance for researchers working with very limited sample quantities. These samples can be natural products isolated in minute quantities from a variety of organisms or protein samples that have been prepared in small scale expression systems or isolated from natural sources.

The combination of the gain achieved by cryogenic cooling of both coil and preamplifier and by proprietary high-sensitivity electronics designs leads to this significant increase in sensitivity. For a given sample amount, a 6-fold gain over a conventional 1.7 mm probe and 14-fold gain over a conventional 5 mm probe are obtained. In some cases, this can lead to a more than 200-fold reduction in experiment time, and furthermore, can enable NMR research with very low sample quantities that would not previously have been possible or practical.

“Many of our customers have urged Bruker BioSpin to develop a Micro-CryoProbe,” said Mr. Oskar Schett, a Managing Director of Bruker BioSpin. “It was clear that after the successes of both our CryoProbes and of our microprobes a combination of the two technologies was the next logical step to further lower the detection limits of NMR for the characterization of many samples that were considered not measurable by NMR”.