Pileio Giuseppe, Dumez Jean-Nicolas, Pop Ionut-Alexandru, Hill-Cousins Joseph T, Brown Richard C D
School of Chemistry, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ Southampton, UK.
School of Chemistry, University of Southampton, SO17 1BJ Southampton, UK; Institut de Chimie des Substances Naturelles, CNRS UPR 2301, Avenue de la Terrasse, 91190 Gif-sur-Yvette, France.
J Magn Reson. 2015 Mar;252:130-4. doi: 10.1016/j.jmr.2015.01.016. Epub 2015 Jan 31.
Magnetic resonance imaging can be used to study motional processes such as flow and diffusion, but the accessible timescales are limited by longitudinal relaxation. The spatially selective conversion from magnetization to long-lived singlet order in designer molecules makes it possible to tag a region of interest for an extended period of time, of the order of several minutes. Here we exploit this concept of "singlet tagging" to monitor diffusion over a macroscopic scale as well as very slow flow.