Improving the Sensitivity of FESTA Methods for the Analysis of Fluorinated Mixtures

The analysis of complex mixtures is an important but often intractable problem. When species contain sparse fluorine atoms, NMR spectra of fluorine-containing spin systems can be efficiently extracted from an intact mixture using the recently proposed FESTA (Fluorine-Edited Selective TOCSY Acquisition) methodology. Here an alternative approach to the existing selective reverse INEPT FESTA (SRI-FESTA) experiment is described, based on the use of a modulated spin echo for the initial excitation. MODO-FESTA (modulated echo FESTA) is simpler and has a significant sensitivity advantage over SRI-FESTA. Comparisons are presented of the relative sensitivity and spectral purity of the two types of methods.