ACD/Labs and Protasis/MRM Announce Collaboration to Offer a Complete High-Throughput System for NMR
Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) and Protasis/MRM are proud to announce the start of a collaboration that will produce the most complete automated high-throughput system for NMR data production and analysis available. By combining Protasis’ One-Minute NMR system and ACD/Labs’ Automation Server, the entire NMR process – from loading samples to interpretation – is now automated.
The system uses a Web-based interface to log in sample lists and proposed chemical structures. Sample loading and data acquisition are automated with One-Minute NMR. When the NMR spectrometer has produced the spectra the information is gathered by the ACD/Automation Server, and data is automatically processed, analyzed, databased, and proposed structures are verified. The results of all the analyzed samples are then sent back to the One-Minute NMR system, where an e-mail is then prepared for each user showing the color-coded plate results in a graphic (HTML) display. The verification results are clearly marked on the plate display, thereby allowing the user to focus their efforts on only those problems that need attention.
Brent Lefebvre, NMR Product Manager at ACD/Labs, comments, “Working with Protasis is a natural fit because our technologies complement each other so well. Users can only benefit from two industry leaders getting together and making their entire NMR process high-throughput. While ACD/Labs users have had high-throughput tools at their disposal for some time, there was always a disconnect between data production and data analysis. With this new collaboration, this gap has been bridged. The most exciting part is that users only ever need to open the spectra that need their attention. This should significantly reduce the amount of time spent on NMR analyses.”
Bob Albrecht, One-Minute NMR Product Manager, adds, “This combined system will open new doors to NMR in the same way that library searches advanced mass spectrometry, but with the improved structure information of NMR. With a capacity of thousands of samples and cycle times in the range of one minute, One-Minute NMR is ready to provide fully automated molecular structure confirmation. Our joint effort was designed from the start to answer the question: “Do I have the molecule I think I have?” in the most efficient way possible.”
About Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc.
Advanced Chemistry Development, Inc., (ACD/Labs) is a chemistry software company offering solutions that truly integrate chemical structures with analytical chemistry information to produce ChemAnalytics®. ACD/Labs creates innovative software packages that aid chemical research scientists worldwide with spectroscopic validation of structures, elucidation of unknown substances, chromatographic separation, medicinal chemistry, preformulation of novel drug agents, systematic nomenclature generation, and chemical patenting and publication. Combined, ACD/Labs’ solutions create an analytical informatics system that provides dramatic feed-forward effects on the chemical and pharmaceutical research process. Founded in 1993, and headquartered in Toronto, Canada, ACD/Labs employs a team of over 100 dedicated individuals whose continual efforts carry ACD/Labs’ innovative technologies into pharmaceutical, biotech, chemical, and materials companies throughout the world. Information about Advanced Chemistry Development and its products is available at www.acdlabs.com .
About Protasis/MRM
Protasis Corporation (Marlboro, MA) is the leading manufacturer and seller of capillary-based, microliter-volume NMR automation systems for NMR spectroscopy. The MRM Division of Protasis (Savoy, IL) was originally founded in 1994 by an interdisciplinary group of chemists, NMR spectroscopists, and engineers from the Beckman Institute at the University of Illinois to develop and bring to market microcoil (microliter-volume) NMR detection technology. Protasis was founded in 1999 as a spinoff of Waters Corporation (Milford, MA) to utilize microfluidics technologies and expertise to address new markets in microchemistry. Since joining forces in 2000, the combination of MRM’s microcoil detection technologies with Protasis’ microfluidics systems has resulted in systems offerings that target economical use of small volumes of sample to achieve excellent NMR data quality. The ability to collect data from smaller amounts of sample means that NMR can be applied earlier and more economically in the customer’s process, resulting in faster decision-making. The intrinsic sensitivity of MicroFlow NMR is complemented by a complete suite of software tools that enable automation of the analysis, from the importing of sample lists at the time of sample submission, to automatic e-mail reporting of results at the end of the run. The addition of structure confirmation to high quality NMR spectra now provides chemists with complete information about their samples. Protasis products are described in greater detail at www.protasis.com .
