Morin is a natural polyphenolic compound best known for its bioactive properties. Due to its flavonoid structure, Morin may also be considered as a potential precursor of diverse functional materials. Sadly, its poor solubility in water altered its application in this field till now. In this work, by applying simple but effective sol-gel reactions, organic and carbon nanostructures were synthesized and described for the first time. We succeeded in porous materials (BET: 50–600 m²/g) with an original 3D morphology, e.g., hollow hexagonal nanopipes, nanobars, or nanofoams. All received carbons contained metal oxides traces (Co, Zn, Mg, Al), originated from corresponding Lewis acids used as catalysts, and formed after the pyrolysis. The CM-Co samples, having around 7 wt. % of cobalt deposits, were chosen to investigate their suitability for electrochemical conversion of CO₂ and photochemical oxidation of benzyl alcohol (BnOH). The CM-Co successfully converted CO₂ to CH₄ with faradic efficiency (FE) of 12 %, wherein the yield of the reaction was correlated with the applied potential of electrolysis. Furthermore, the CO₂ reduction was carried out in ambient conditions. The photochemical oxidation of benzyl alcohol to benzaldehyde yielded 14 % efficiency, while the BnOH oxidation process was realized with a sunlight (UV+VIS) simulator.

Conventional acquisition of two-dimensional (2D) NMR signals is based on an equidistant sampling in both time dimensions. The expected signal bandwidth determines the minimum sampling rate; the desired spectral resolution determines the maximum sampling time. Together, these two principles contribute to a minimum number of sampling points required for satisfactory spectrum quality. Additionally, it takes a few seconds for nuclei to relax between the acquisition of consecutive FID signals in a 2D interferogram. These three requirements cause 2D NMR experiments to last even tens of hours, in extreme cases. One of the standard methods to avoid lengthy data collection is to omit a significant proportion of sampling points during acquisition and reconstruct them later using dedicated algorithms. Such an approach to data acquisition is known as non-uniform sampling (NUS). The reconstruction algorithms exploit specific features of the measured signal, usually some form of compressibility. In this chapter, we will discuss the fundamentals of NUS methods including (a) motivation to use NUS in 2D NMR; (b) basic math behind the reconstruction algorithms; (c) commonly used distributions of sampling points; and (d) the use of related approaches in diffusometry, relaxometry, serial experiments and pure-shift NMR.

Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is a key method for the determination of molecular structures. Due to its intrinsically high (i.e., atomistic) resolution and versatility, it has found numerous applications for investigating gases, liquids, and solids. However, liquid-state NMR has found little application for suspensions of solid particles as the resonances of such systems are excessively broadened, typically beyond the detection threshold. Herein, we propose a route to overcoming this critical limitation by enhancing the signals of particle suspensions by >3.000-fold using dissolution dynamic nuclear polarization (d-DNP) coupled with rapid solid precipitation. For the proof-of-concept series of experiments, we employed calcium phosphate (CaP) as a model system. By d-DNP, we boosted the signals of phosphate ³¹P spins before rapid CaP precipitation inside the NMR spectrometer, leading to the inclusion of the hyperpolarized phosphate into CaP-nucleated solid particles within milliseconds. With our approach, within only 1 s of acquisition time, we obtained spectra of biphasic systems, i.e., micrometer-sized dilute solid CaP particles coexisting with their solution-state precursors. Thus, this work is a step toward real-time characterization of the solid–solution equilibrium. Finally, integrating the hyperpolarized data with molecular dynamics simulations and electron microscopy enabled us to shed light on the CaP formation mechanism in atomistic detail.