Modified PSYCHE NMR - the possibility for the direct semi-quantitation of components in mixtures

A series of commonly occurring biologically relevant compounds were analysed using internally referenced PSYCHE NMR and the accuracy/precision compared with that achieved using conventional qNMR. The effect of chemical shift, coupling constants, swept frequency pulse angle, excitation sculpting and the impact of signal overlap in mixtures was evaluated in terms of statistically significant variation between the two techniques. It is shown that suitably optimised PSYCHE NMR represents a potentially reliable method for the semi-quantitation of mixtures of compounds, whose spectroscopic signals overlap in conventional qNMR analysis and hence cannot be accurately quantified with that technique. This is of particular relevance for complex mixtures of natural products. Of particular note is the effect of the excitation sculpting block introduced to supress baseline artefacts.