New way of machining tiny diamond rotors could improve protein studies

MIT researchers develop new way of machining tiny diamond rotors out of diamond crystal.

The advance opens the door to studying a wide variety of important molecules, including those found in amyloid plaques associated with Alzheimer's disease.

The new method is described in the Journal of Magnetic Resonance, in a paper by MIT graduate students.

The rotor can already spin at 6 million revoluti MAS-NMR minute, the speed of the best zirconia rotors.

Such high rotation rates are almost unheard of outside the NMR field.

They have already used the new diamond rotor to produce the carbon-13 and nitrogen-15 spectra of a small peptide.

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