Applied NMRSpectroscopy for

Chemists and LifeScientists

The book Applied NMR Spectros-copy for Chemists and Life Scientists, by

Oliver Zerbe and Simon Jurt of the Uni-versity of Z�rich, is a new, comprehensive,

and very impressive NMR textbook. It is idealfor introducing students of chemistry, biochemistry,and biophysics to the subject of NMR spectroscopy,and it is equally well suited to become a vademecum for PhD students who wish to develop orapply NMR spectroscopy to more advancedresearch projects.

There are a number of excellent NMR text-books already on the market, and therefore it is alegitimate question whether a new textbook canadd anything new. The book by Zerbe and Jurt doesthat, at an astonishing level. Some people haveargued that NMR is now a mature field, and thatscarcely any fundamentally new concepts remain tobe invented or explored. Nothing could be morewrong than that statement. In fact, over the last 10years NMR has developed rapidly. The way we nowdo NMR is fundamentally different from the NMRapproaches of ten years ago.

It is exactly this change in methods andtechnologies that is at the heart of the textbookby Zerbe and Jurt, which achieves that by doingsomething rarely done: it avoids reproducing con-cepts that are now outdated. Instead, it includeseasily understandable introductions to the newaspects of NMR, such as residual dipolar coupling,paramagnetic NMR applications (e.g., spin label-ing), cross-correlated relaxation to understand theTROSY effect, new 3D methods, and method-ologies for sensitivity improvement, to name just afew. In other words, nothing that is hot and excitingand important has escaped the attention of theauthors, and they provide descriptions based onconcepts that are understandable and easy tofollow.

Some of the new concepts require novel ways ofteaching NMR. A principle that is applied consis-tently throughout the book is to introduce thesenew concepts at a level that can be understood by achemist and a biochemist. I am convinced that theauthors� way of thinking about how to teach NMR

has been influenced by Malcolm Levitt�s seminalbook Spin Dynamics: Basics of Nuclear MagneticResonance, Second Edition (John Wiley & Sons,2008). I regard the present book as one thattranslates Levitt�s rigorously presented physicalconcepts into a form understandable by the non-physics researcher, focusing on the importantconcepts in a very convincing way.

The book has 548 pages and is divided into fiveparts: 1) Basics of Solution NMR; 2) Theory ofNMR Spectroscopy; 3) Technical Aspects of NMR;4) Important Phenomena and Methods in ModernNMR; 5) Structure Determination of NaturalProducts by NMR. Each chapter has a short setof problems, with solutions at the end of the book,and the index provides the appropriate links to thetopics in the book.

Reading the book, it is very apparent that theconcepts have successfully passed the ultimate test,namely: whether students in Z�rich have found theteaching useful. This is certainly also due to thecomprehensiveness of the material (theoretical andpractical aspects are covered equally well), and thevery high quality of the figures. Equations andvariables are presented in a consistent manner.Sometimes, where appropriate, historical notes onthe development of NMR spectroscopy areincluded, and this also provides a nice way toemphasize the development of the technique.

Chapter 5 provides an introduction to theapplications of NMR to carbohydrates, steroids,peptides, proteins, and nucleic acids. Simply pro-viding well-chosen example spectra of these differ-ent classes of biologically important moleculesserves as a guide or an appetizer for studentsinterested in entering the field of NMR spectros-copy. Example figures from the literature areadded, and appropriate references to additionalreading are provided.

In summary, I strongly recommend the book byZerbe and Jurt as a key reference textbook forteaching NMR in bachelor and master courses inchemistry, biochemistry, biophysics, and bioinfor-matics.

Harald SchwalbeJohann Wolfgang Goethe UniversityFrankfurt (Germany)

DOI: 10.1002/anie.201410095

Applied NMR Spectroscopyfor Chemists and LifeScientistsBy Oliver Zerbe and SimonJurt. Wiley-VCH, Weinheim,2013. 548 pp., hardcover,E 129.00.—ISBN 978-3527327751

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