Comment on "Boosted molecular mobility during common chemical reactions"

Jan-Philipp Günther; Lucy L Fillbrook; Thomas S C MacDonald; Günter Majer; William S Price; Peer Fischer; Jonathon E Beves

doi:10.1126/science.abe8322

Comment on "Boosted molecular mobility during common chemical reactions"

Science. 2021 Jan 15;371(6526):eabe8322. doi: 10.1126/science.abe8322.

Authors

Jan-Philipp Günther^#^{1

2}, Lucy L Fillbrook^#³, Thomas S C MacDonald³, Günter Majer¹, William S Price⁴, Peer Fischer^{5

2}, Jonathon E Beves⁶

Affiliations

¹ Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany.
² Institute of Physical Chemistry, University of Stuttgart, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany.
³ School of Chemistry, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia.
⁴ Nanoscale Group, School of Science, Western Sydney University, Penrith, NSW 2751, Australia.
⁵ Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems, 70569 Stuttgart, Germany. fischer@is.mpg.de j.beves@unsw.edu.au.
⁶ School of Chemistry, UNSW Sydney, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia. fischer@is.mpg.de j.beves@unsw.edu.au.

^# Contributed equally.

PMID: 33446528
DOI: 10.1126/science.abe8322

Abstract

The apparent "boosted mobility" observed by Wang et al (Reports, 31 July 2020, p. 537) is the result of a known artifact. When signal intensities are changing during a nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) diffusion measurement for reasons other than diffusion, the use of monotonically increasing gradient amplitudes produces erroneous diffusion coefficients. We show that no boosted molecular mobility is observed when shuffled gradient amplitudes are applied.

Publication types

Comment