Sunday 26 April 2009

New Mestrelab Blog


I’m happy to announce our new blog on Mestrelab. As Santi wrote, the purpose of this blog is “to report on company progress and ideas, to tell stories about our trips and conferences, and to highlight aspects of our products which we may think our users may be interested in reading, or hearing, about
A lot of people seemed to be very interested in what we're doing in Mestrelab so we thought that it would be helpful to create this blog so as to keep you all up to date on what’s going on with our commercial initiatives, trips (including photo sets from those trips) etc.
So if you feel curious about Mestrelab activities, please visit our new blog. We look forward to hearing from you.

Mestrelab's blog: http://blog.mestrec.com

Tuesday 21 April 2009

NMR Spectroscopy Explained

When I initiated the development of MestReC back in 1995 (15 years ago!), my knowledge of NMR was fairly elementary and limited to basic theoretical rudiments (quantum mechanics description of NMR phenomenon, vector model, etc) and some experience in the practical interpretation of NMR spectra gained primarily whilst working as an organic chemist at Leicester University.

That said, during that first phase of development, I wish I had enjoyed the opportunity to have access to the book ‘NMR Spectroscopy Explained: Simplified Theory, Applications and Examples for Organic Chemistry and Structural Biology' by Neil Jacobson, I’m sure that my productivity would have been boosted very significantly by it. For example, there is an unmissable section devoted to practical NMR aspects and, in particular, NMR data acquisition and processing. It’s clear from this section that the book was written from the perspective of a spectroscopist who works with NMR on a day-to-day basis (Neil Jacobsen is the NMR Facility Manager at the University of Arizona). Concepts such as oversampling and digital filtering are presented in more detail than that found in standard introductory texts. I bought this book about 6 months ago and I have to say that it is a shame that it wasn’t available much earlier when I started my work on NMR.

Nothing is ever perfect and if I had to point out something missing in the book it would be a chapter devoted to DOSY, which I think would make a nice addition.

Overall, I believe that this is a great book which I warmly recommend to all of you who wish to deepen your understanding of NMR both from a practical and theoretical standpoint. Enjoy, and let me have your thoughts!

Friday 10 April 2009

Mnova reviewed by Tim Claridge at JCIM


High-Resolution NMR Techniques in Organic Chemistry is one of the most popular books on NMR which is now used at many universities as a foundation for graduate-level courses on NMR techniques. It has been written by Tim Claridge who is the Director of NMR Spectroscopy at the Organic Chemistry Department at Oxford University and has now written a very nice review on Mnova in the Journal of Chemistry Information and Modeling (JCIM). I'll just quote one of his conclusions because I'd rather let you read the full article:

Overall I was very impressed with the package, finding it not only very comfortable and intuitive to use so well suited to non-NMR specialist, but also well endowed with more advanced processing features for more experienced users

(Click here for the full article)

I would like to take this opportunity to
thank all of you for your support, advice and contributions to our design and development, and also congratulate my team; it seems we are doing well at developing easy to use but powerful NMR software. But don’t worry, we are not going to get complacent because of reviews like this, on the contrary, they are just a spur to work harder and develop the software further

Article bookmark. Tim Claridge University of Oxford J. Chem. Inf. Model., Article ASAP DOI: 10.1021/ci900090d Publication Date (Web): March 30, 2009 http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ci900090d Copyright © 2009 American Chemical Society