Pure-Shift-Based Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy for High-Resolution Studies of Biological Samples

Proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy (1H MRS) presents a powerful tool for revealing molecular-level metabolite information, complementary to the anatomical insight delivered by magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), thus playing a significant role in in vivo/in vitro biological studies. However, its further applications are generally confined by spectral congestion caused by numerous biological metabolites contained within the limited proton frequency range. Herein, we propose a pure-shift-based 1H localized MRS method as a proof of concept for high-resolution studies of biological samples. Benefitting from the spectral simplification from multiplets to singlet peaks, this method addresses the challenge of spectral congestion encountered in conventional MRS experiments and facilitates metabolite analysis from crowded NMR resonances. The performance of the proposed pure-shift 1H MRS method is demonstrated on different kinds of samples, including brain metabolite phantom and in vitro biological samples of intact pig brain tissue and grape tissue, using a 7.0 T animal MRI scanner. This proposed MRS method is readily implemented in common commercial NMR/MRI instruments because of its generally adopted pulse-sequence modules. Therefore, this study takes a meaningful step for MRS studies toward potential applications in metabolite analysis and disease diagnosis.