Using NMR to identify and characterize natural products

Covering: up to November 2012 Over the past 28 years there have been several thousand publications describing the use of 2D NMR to identify and characterize natural products. During this time period, the amount of sample needed for this purpose has decreased from the 20-50 mg range to under 1 mg. This has been due to both improvements in NMR hardware and methodology. This review will focus on mainly methodology improvements, particularly in pulse sequences, acquisition and processing methods which are particularly relevant to natural product research, with lesser discussion of hardware improvements. The use of 2D NMR and selective 1D NMR experiments has helped to revolutionize natural product structure elucidation. This review focuses on the improvements in NMR pulse sequences and processing methods that have contributed to this revolution.