Egyptian mummies were covered with an enigmatic black organic matter. Its chemical composition is classically determined by molecular analysis methods, which are destructive by nature. In a new analytical approach based on 1H and 14N hyperfine spectroscopy, we use V⁺ ions, existing at trace level in this black matter, as internal probes for a non-destructive exploration of the material. The results suggest that a common recipe was used for animal and human mummies of different ages.

In this article we report a multiscale approach for explaining why the transport of fluids in oil shales is so hindered. Thanks to nuclear and electronic magnetic resonances, we first demonstrate that the kerogen within the shale is capable of swelling in the presence of oil; and second we show that this swelling is reversible and reveals the presence of vanadyl porphyrin by breaking magnetic interaction. The magnetic interactions evidenced helps understand the very low mobility of hydrocarbons.

A straightforward, rather accurate approach to extract quantitative restraints for the structure calculation of ligand–protein complexes is presented.

We present a generalized measurement-based 3D-visualization approach for describing dynamics in strongly coupled spin ensembles. The visualized surfaces conveniently represent symmetries of density matrices and allow spotting of their presence (orientation, alignment, etc.) or absence even when direct analysis of density matrices is not obvious. We apply a novel visualization approach to represent relevant cases of 2-spin system dynamics.

Dynamic nuclear polarisation (DNP) transfers polarisation from electron to nuclear spins. This is usually combined with direct detection of the latter. Here, we show that it is possible to reverse the transfer at 1.2 T. This allows us to investigate the spin dynamics of nuclear spins close to electrons – something that is notoriously difficult with established methods. We expect reverse DNP to be useful in the study of spin diffusion or as a building block for more elaborate pulse sequences.

Having shown that tagging a protein at a single site with different lanthanoid complexes delivers outstanding structural information at a selected site of a protein (such as active sites and ligand binding sites), we now present a simple way by which different lanthanoid complexes can be assembled on a highly solvent-exposed cysteine residue. Furthermore, the chemical assembly is selective for selenocysteine, if a selenocysteine residue can be introduced into the protein of interest.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) is a great tool for analytical chemistry, but it is not the most sensitive one. This work aims to develop a sensitive and repeatable workflow for the analysis of complex samples by hyperpolarized ¹³C NMR. Through systematic and careful optimization of experimental parameters, we were able to achieve unprecedented sensitivity for the analysis of naturally abundant metabolite mixtures while maintaining the precision required for metabolomic studies.

Dynamic nuclear polarization requires a waveguide that connects the cold (1–10 K) sample space to the outside. To reduce the heating of the sample, a waveguide is produced from steel which has low thermal conductivity but attenuates the microwaves. Therefore, the inside of the waveguide should be plated with silver to reduce electrical losses. We show a new simple way to electroplate such waveguides with a thin silver layer and show that this improves the experimental performance.

Could the gesture of an ancient artist applying a paint layer be reconstructed using EPR analysis? In the case of an inorganic pigment widely used in antiquity, Egyptian blue, where the anisotropy of the Cu²⁺ EPR signal reflects the symmetry of the pigment crystallites, we have shown that the orientation distribution of the grains, as revealed by simulation of EPR spectra, is indeed influenced by the nature of the gesture.