Presaturation is the most classical procedure to minimize and suppress the intense solvent resonance when ¹H spectra are recorded in H₂O solutions.

Easy implementation on AVANCE spectrometer

Presaturation is usually performed by applying a low-power continuous wave irradiation on the water resonance during the pre-scan period It can be incorporated in this way on any pulse sequence and, in addition, it can also be applying in other parts of the experiment as, for instance, during the mixing time of NOESY experiments.

Experiments using presaturation are usually acquired in a fully automated way. Minor changes from a predefined parameter set are required. The most important parameters to optimize are the duration and the power level of the irradiation.

For further details on practical implementation of water presaturation on AVANCE spectrometers see, for instance:

• Tutorial: 1D Water Presaturarion.
• 2D TOCSY experiment with presaturation
• 2D NOESY experiment with presaturation

A conventional spectrum is obtained from which the intense solvent resonance has been minimize in order to see smaller signals.

Solvent suppression schemes