Long-Lived, Transportable Reservoir of Nuclear Polarization Used to Strongly Enhance Solution-State NMR Signals.

There is a fundamental issue with the use of dynamic nuclear polarization (DNP) to enhance nuclear spin polarization: the same polarizing agent (PA) needed for DNP is also responsible for shortening the lifetime of the hyperpolarization. As a result, long-term storage and transport of hyperpolarized samples is severely restricted and the apparatus for DNP is necessarily located near or integrated with the apparatus using the hyperpolarized spins. In this paper, we demonstrate that naphthalene single crystals can serve as a long-lived reservoir of proton polarization that can be exploited to enhance signals in benchtop and high-field NMR of target molecules in solution at a site 300 km away by a factor of several thousand. The naphthalene protons are polarized using short-lived optically excited triplet states of pentacene instead of stable radicals. In the absence of optical excitation, the electron spins remain in a singlet ground state, eliminating the major pathway of nuclear spin-lattice relaxation. The polarization decays with a time constant of about 50 h at 80 K and 0.5 T or above 800 h at 5 K and 20 mT. A module based on a Halbach array yielding a field of 0.75 T and a conventional cryogenic dry shipper, operating at liquid nitrogen temperature, allows storage and long distance transport of the polarization to a remote laboratory, where the polarization of the crystal is transferred after dissolution to a target molecule of choice by intermolecular cross-relaxation. The procedure has been executed repeatedly and has proven to be reliable and robust.

Solution-State 2D NMR Spectroscopy of Mixtures HyperpolarizedUsing Optically Polarized Crystals.

The HYPNOESYS method (Hyperpolarized NOE System), which relies on the dissolution of optically polarized crystals, has recently emerged as a promising approach to enhance the sensitivity of NMR spectroscopy in the solution state. However, HYPNOESYS is a single-shot method that is not generally compatible with multidimensional NMR. Here we show that 2D NMR spectra can be obtained from HYPNOESYS-polarized samples, using single-scan acquisition methods. The approach is illustrated with a mixture of terpene molecules and a benchtop NMR spectrometer, paving the way to a sensitive, information-rich and affordable analytical method.

Hyperpolarized Solution-State NMR Spectroscopy with Optically Polarized Crystals.

Nuclear spin hyperpolarization provides a promising route to overcome the challenges imposed by the limited sensitivity of nuclear magnetic resonance. Here we demonstrate that dissolution of spin-polarized pentacene-doped naphthalene crystals enables transfer of polarization to target molecules via intermolecular cross-relaxation at room temperature and moderate magnetic fields (1.45 T). This makes it possible to exploit the high spin polarization of optically polarized crystals, while mitigating the challenges of its transfer to external nuclei. With this method, we inject the highly polarized mixture into a benchtop NMR spectrometer and observe the polarization dynamics for target 1H nuclei. Although the spectra are radiation damped due to the high naphthalene magnetization, we describe a procedure to process the data to obtain more conventional NMR spectra and extract the target nuclei polarization. With the entire process occurring on a time scale of 1 min, we observe NMR signals enhanced by factors between -200 and -1730 at 1.45 T for a range of small molecules.

Hyperpolarization without persistent radicals for in vivo real-time metabolic imaging.

Hyperpolarized substrates prepared via dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization have been proposed as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) agents for cancer or cardiac failure diagnosis and therapy monitoring through the detection of metabolic impairments in vivo. The use of potentially toxic persistent radicals to hyperpolarize substrates was hitherto required. We demonstrate that by shining UV light for an hour on a frozen pure endogenous substance, namely the glucose metabolic product pyruvic acid, it is possible to generate a concentration of photo-induced radicals that is large enough to highly enhance the (13)C polarization of the substance via dynamic nuclear polarization. These radicals recombine upon dissolution and a solution composed of purely endogenous products is obtained for performing in vivo metabolic hyperpolarized (13)C MRI with high spatial resolution. Our method opens the way to safe and straightforward preclinical and clinical applications of hyperpolarized MRI because the filtering procedure mandatory for clinical applications and the associated pharmacological tests necessary to prevent contamination are eliminated, concurrently allowing a decrease in the delay between preparation and injection of the imaging agents for improved in vivo sensitivity.