By Ben Reiner
As global markets shift to adopt the climate-conscious viewpoints of everyday consumers, chemical manufacturers must shift their materials portfolio toward greener and more sustainable alternatives. Polysaccharides are a privileged class of biopolymers that enjoy tremendous success in a wide variety of markets owing to critical mechanical and rheological properties in both the solution and solid phase. Designing polysaccharide materials from a bottom-up approach requires holistic understanding of the fundamental polymer reactivity. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is exceedingly well-poised to provide microstructural and kinetic information in a throughput that is amenable to synthetic iteration. This talk will demonstrate how a suite of simple 1D selective excitation and pseudo 2D experiments can be used to synthesize chemical shift maps that assign individual polymer components to individual spectral signatures. Furthermore, NMR spectra are directly used to inform kinetic Monte Carlo models which provide invaluable qualitative and quantitative kinetic information. The talk will aim to serve as a tutorial for the use of advanced informatics as a low barrier, every day tool set for the non-expert user.