Applications of microfluidics in nuclear magnetic resonance

Abstract

Microfluidics is a constantly growing field of research, finding applications in a diverse range of subjects such as materials science, chemistry and across the life sciences. This expansion is due to many advantageous attributes: small sample volumes which contribute to waste reduction and reduced cost of experimentation; highly controllable local environments that enable very precise investigation of changes in systems to stimuli; rapid prototyping techniques that mean make, test, tweak cycles can be run more than once in a typical day; ease of parallelisation makes gathering statistically significant data much easier without the need to repeat experiments for days at a time; and ease of automation increases precision and repeatability.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a widely applied technique in chemistry and the life sciences. Its non-invasive and non-destructive nature makes NMR ideal to study living, or mass limited samples. NMR, however, requires an extremely homogenous magnetic field to enable molecular structure determination and can be limited by the inherent low sensitivities possible in a typical experiment.

This thesis describes methods for integrating these two fields. Some NMR experiments being ‘miniaturised’ to be performed ‘on-chip’ as well as microfluidic concepts that have been engineered to be compatible with NMR techniques. These techniques do not seek to replace established methods of microfluidic analysis such as mass spectrometry or fluorescence spectroscopy but could be used to compliment these techniques as an additional method of extracting data from a system.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Marcel Utz: orcid.org/0000-0003-2274-9672

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