Unlocking the full power of benchtop NMR using automated hyperpolarisation

Posted on Thursday 25 June 2026

Benchtop NMR offers high accessibility and low costs compared with traditional high field NMR spectrometers, but suffers from low sensitivity and signal overlap. A new paper published in Analytical Chemistry by the Halse group, led by PDRA Dr Daniel Taylor, addresses this problem by integrating automated hyperpolarisation, using SABRE methods, directly into any NMR experiment to deliver remarkable signal enhancements of over 1000-fold.

By achieving highly repeatable signal enhancement the group showed that:

• Natural abundance ¹³C{¹H} benchtop NMR spectra of a 3 mM mixture of N-heterocycles is possible;
• Enhanced ¹³C NMR signals at natural abundance can be exploited to disentangle severely overlapped 1H NMR signals, allowing for detailed assignment of peaks;
• The rapid analysis of mixture components at micromolar concentrations using single-scan 2D ¹H-¹H COSY experiments is possible

By developing computer-controlled parahydrogen delivery and sample shuttling the integration of these hyperpolarisation methods into any NMR experiment is now possible. Moreover, the signal enhancement is highly repeatable, thus facilitating the use of benchtop NMR analysis for low-concentration, natural abundance mixtures using a range of standard 1D and 2D methods. This automated hyperpolarisation approach significantly improves the utility of benchtop NMR for mixture analysis, paving the way for routine, high-performance spectroscopy outside of traditional high-field facilities.

This work would not have been possible without the world-class technical team, including Abigail Mortimer and Stuart Murray, who played a key role in the design and construction of the novel instrumentation developed in this work, and are co-authors on the paper.