ABSTRACT
Plants are the most prolific factories for the production of small molecules. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a spectroscopic technique that exploits the magnetic properties of the atomic nucleus. Proton NMR provides an overview of the most important proton-containing low-molecular mass metabolites in a tissue crude extract above a minimum threshold level, in a non-targeted way. The great strength of NMR as an analytical tool lies in the fact that the precise frequency at which a nucleus resonates depends on the local magnetic field that the nucleus experiences. NMR is an insensitive technique because of the small extinction coefficients for NMR transitions. High resolution H NMR methods are generally less sensitive than mass spectrometry-based methods but have been developed for rapid metabolic fingerprinting. One of the main advantages of H-NMR is that structural and quantitative information can be obtained on numerous chemical species with a wide range of concentrations in a single NMR experiment, with excellent reproducibility.
