Inverse Spectroscopy was developped to study insensitive nuclei (labeled as S, such as ¹³C or ¹⁵N) from a high-sensitivity nucleus (labeled as I), typically ¹H, which is usually detected with high sensitivity (see Sensitivity of NMR experiments). In general, the best approach is as follow:

The pulse scheme starts from ¹H magnetization which is transfer to the heteronucleus and then come back again to the ¹H, which is detected as usual. The incorporation of PFG largely improves the performance of such experiments, allowing their use as a powerful routine tools (see Inverse gradient-based 2D experiments). In addition, the basics of inverse spectroscopy has been extended in the design of 2D/3D/4D NMR experiments of large biomolecules (see NMR experiments on Proteins).

Phase-Cycle 2D HMQC  2D HSQC  2D HMBC  2D HQQC 2D Inverse HOESY	Phase-cycle hybrid 2D HMQC-COSY  2D HMQC-TOCSY  2D HMQC-ROESY  2D HMQC-NOESY  2D HSQC-COSY  2D HSQC-TOCSY  2D HSQC-ROESY  2D HSQC-NOESY
X-edited 2D X-edited COSY-DQF 2D X-edited TOCSY 2D X-edited NOESY 2D w1-X-edited HOESY	Band-Selective Semi-selective 2D HMQC Semi-selective 2D HSQC Semi-selective 2D HMBC