$^{129}$Xe NMR-based biosensing on a benchtop spectrometer

The nuclear polarization of noble gases, such as xenon, can be enhanced by several orders of magnitude through optical pumping, giving rise to very sensitive NMR probes. Moreover, due to its large and deformable electron cloud, xenon exhibits wide chemical shift range (more than 320 ppm for the monoatomic species) and is soluble in most biological fluids. It can be reversibly encapsulated in molecular host systems such as cage-molecules, decorated with ligands in order to target given receptors, and gives rise to sensitive detection of biological events. This two-step procedure, where the xenon host is first introduced and hyperpolarized xenon then delivered, benefits from the difference in resonance frequency between bound xenon and free xenon (in the gas phase or in the dissolved phase) [1]. This work has recently been published in Magnetic Resonance [2].