March 12, 2009
by Ryan Sasaki, NMR Product Manager, ACD/Labs
This post will mark the beginning of a series of several posts.
Please note that for this particular series I am talking mostly about medicinal or synthetic chemists who acquire their own NMR data in an open access environment.
Many chemists in the industry use our software, and
when we were doing market research and testing to try and develop the
best tool for chemists, I came away with several generalizations. I
will post these over the next couple of weeks.
I am going to start off this series by talking about what chemists generally DON'T use NMR Software for.
While there are some chemists who will apply sophisticated processing, accurately integrate, peak pick and characterize all multiplets, assign multiplets in the software to an electronic structure, work with a series, write macros, etc. my observations are that these are few and far between. Most chemists are not going to play with all of the bells and whistles within an NMR software package.
After all, it's not their job to do all of that in most cases. Their job is to make compounds and make sure they made what they thought they made oftentimes using a variety of techniques, not just NMR.
“Most chemists are not going to play with all of the bells and whistles within an NMR software package.”
Very true. Many years ago when I was doing my (synthetic organic) postdoc I found a simple little free program called MestRe-C that, with its default settings and minimal number of buttons and menus, did most of what I needed for routine 1H/13C NMR processing. It was a great little app that I continued to use for years.
There’s a lot to be said for simple, effective tools that do what you need and then get out of the way.
Thanks for the comment Rich.
I can definitely agree with the approach to try and develop a tool for a market segment that does what they need, and then “gets out of the way”
Definitely one of the things we learned when we developed 1D NMR Assistant for chemists. Before this release, many chemists were using our NMR Processor which was really developed over the years for expert users. While chemists used it, there were certainly too many buttons and too much functionality, that hid other useful features for them.
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