It is a great sadness that Prof. Alfred G. Redfield left us. He had donated his life to NMR research, especially NMR relaxation. His last work was pushing the field-dependent relaxation, relaxometry study, into atomic resolution. His pioneer point of view opened a brand new aspect of NMR relaxation study.
We are honor to invite Prof. Mary F. Roberts, Emeritus Professor of Chemistry department from Boston College, and Prof. Tai-huang Huang, Prof. Dr. Distinguished Research Fellow from Academia Sinica to share their stories working with Prof. Redfield on field-cycling NMR.
Al’s last project was to make an add-on shuttling system for a Varian INOVA Plus (it was underutilized at Brandeis once the 600 MHz spectrometer was available) that was simple enough for a biochemist to use (that was where I came in). The initial goal was ‘high-resolution’ 31P field cycling relaxometry. While there are lots of interesting phosphorus-containing biomolecules, at the high fields of modern spectrometers the 31P T1 has a large CSA relaxation component as well as dipolar interactions. Initially, Al thought that at the very least one would be able to get correlation times and an effective distance between the 31P and 1H nuclei that relax it. I used to refer to it as ‘Al’s Spin Spa’ because shuttling to low fields was a great way to relax spins . . .
|