Deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI) is a novel 3D method to image metabolism of deuterium-labeled substrates in healthy or diseased human brain. DMI provides a powerful tool to reveal altered metabolism and provides completely novel information compared to standard MRI. Examples of aberrant metabolism in aggressive tumors demonstrate the unique metabolic dimension that DMI adds to the standard...
NMR line shapes have long been analyzed to study coupling constants and multiplicities, molecular structure and mobility, chemical exchange and other molecular properties. Line shape narrowing by complex shim procedures, sample spinning and/or other techniques has been extremely important for optimal suppression of line shape contributions not related to molecular properties. In biomedical...
Superparamagnetic Iron Oxide Nanoparticles (SPIONs) are used extensively in multiple biomedical applications such as hyperthermia, MRI enhancing reagents and drug delivery. However, despite their wide spread application, their environmental impacts, especially on the aquatic environment are not well understood. Daphnia magna (water fleas) are keystone species ubiquitous in freshwater...
In vivo magnetic resonance spectroscopy has evolved during the last 25 years in terms of localization quality and spatial resolution, acquisition speed, artifact suppression, number of detectable metabolites and quantification precision and has benefited from the significant increase of magnetic field strength that recently became available for in vivo investigations. Today it allows for...
Introduction: Modern clinical MRI systems are able to offer sub-millimetre imaging of the human body. However, the high up-front and maintenance cost of these systems means that much of the world lacks access to this technology. For clinical conditions such as hydrocephalus where very high resolution images are not required, low-field MRI systems can offer a low-cost approach towards...
Recent breakthroughs in optical and electron microscopy have changed the fields of Cell and Structural Biology in a most profound manner, with ever more detailed information about the inner workings of cells becoming available. Complementary to the advancements, novel in situ methods are beginning to emerge as powerful tools in Cellular Structural Biology. Here, I discuss how recent...
Structural investigation of nucleic acids is usually carried out either in diluted buffered solutions or on crystals of these biomolecules. These environments markedly differ from the native one in which these molecules are found, where effects as macromolecular crowding or intermolecular interactions can play a significant role on the conformation.
Aim of the present study was to investigate...
Increasing evidence suggests that the highly complex and dynamic environment of the cell interior and its physiochemical setting imposes critical control on cellular functions, which is hardly reproducible under in vitro conditions. In-cell solution-state NMR can track such structural and dynamical interactions at the atomic level provided that proteins or other molecular units are small and...
Resistance to antibiotics is a growing health concern worldwide. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) present an alternative to conventional antibiotics but details of their mechanism of action and the basis for differences in their potency observed between different bacterial strains remain unclear. Structural information is crucial for defining the molecular mechanism by which these peptides...
Since the invention of dissolution Dynamic Nuclear Polarization (DDNP)$^{1}$ and the dramatic signal enhancement it provides in solution-state NMR, a wide range of applications have emerged. In particular, this improvement opens new avenues for the study of fast dynamical processes such as chemical reactions, with a time resolution smaller than a second. DDNP has proven of particular interest...
An extraordinary feature of brain function is the encoding of information at multiple spatial and temporal scales, going from the cellular level in the form of action potentials to coordinated activity over billions of neurons spanning large parts of the brain, if not the entire brain, to achieve perception and behavior. Bridging and spanning these multiple scales of organization is an...
The roster of molecular imaging methods has been recently extended by the introduction of deuterium metabolic imaging (DMI), whereby after administration of a deuterated precursor in rodents or humans, deuterium MRS and MRSI is used to examine metabolic products such as glutamine/glutamate or lactate when applied to brain studies. Here we examine its use for imaging pregnancy-related...