Exploration of the close chemical space of tryptophan and tyrosine reveals importance of hydrophobicity in CW-photo-CIDNP performances.

Sensitivity being one of the main hurdles of nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) can be gained by polarization techniques including chemically induced dynamic nuclear polarization (CIDNP). Kaptein demonstrated that the basic mechanism of the CIDNP arises from spin sorting based on coherent electron-electron nuclear spin dynamics during the formation and the recombination of a radical pair in a magnetic field. In photo-CIDNP of interest here the radical pair is between a dye and the molecule to be polarized. Here, we explore continuous-wave (CW) photo-CIDNP (denoted CW-photo-CIDNP) with a set of 10 tryptophan and tyrosine analogues, many of them newly identified to be photo-CIDNP active, and we observe not only signal enhancement of 2 orders of magnitude for H at 600 MHz (corresponding to 10 000 times in measurement time) but also reveal that polarization enhancement correlates with the hydrophobicity of the molecules. Furthermore, the small chemical library established indicates the existence of many photo-CIDNP-active molecules.