FESTA: an efficient NMR approach for the structural analysis of mixtures containing fluorinated species

In complex mixtures, proton nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectra are often very crowded, making spectral analysis complicated or even impossible, particularly when detailed structural information about the mixture components is needed. A new 1D NMR method (fluorine-edited selective TOCSY acquisition, FESTA) is introduced that facilitates the structural analysis of mixtures of species that contain fluorine. It allows simplified 1H spectra to be obtained that show only those protons that are in a spin system coupled to fluorine of interest. The new method is illustrated by factorizing a complex 1H spectrum into subspectra for individual spin systems involving different 19F sites.