Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We demonstrate the use of micro-scale nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) for studying the transfer of spin coherence in non-equilibrium chemical processes, using spatially separated NMR encoding and detection coils. As an example, we provide the map of chemical shift correlations for the amino acid alanine as it transitions from the zwitterionic to the anionic form. Our method is unique in the sense that it allows us to track the chemical migration of encoded nuclear spins during the course of chemical transformations.