Special Problems of NMR in H₂O Solution

Abstract

Most biochemical NMR is performed in aqueous solutions, most often in D₂O containing typically 1% proton impurity as HDO, but also quite often in 80–100% H₂O. The latter is necessary if you want to observe exchangeable protons in a macromolecule, or if for some reason replacement of H₂O by D₂O is impractical. The large narrow HDO or H₂O signal, equivalent to up to 100 molar proton concentration, presents various problems which will be outlined here, together with partial solutions.