Konstantin Ivanov Intercontinental Magnetic Resonance Seminar

Konstantin Ivanov intercontinental magnetic resonance seminar series started on April 8, 2020. It organises seminars on a range of topics in magnetic resonance covering NMR, EPR, hyperpolarisation, colour centres and optical pumping, and ZULF NMR. The emphasis of the talks are on both methods and applications and a perspective on the future of the field. The speakers include a wide range of scientists ranging from PhD students to post-doctoral fellows, to senior scientists.

Upcoming Talks:

• November 14, 2025, Olivier Girard, Aix-Marseille University, France, "Relaxation and magnetization transfer contrasts in quantitative MRI of the central nervous system" Biological tissues are dynamically heterogeneous spin systems containing a large variety of proton-carrying molecules, evolving in different magnetic environments, and exchanging magnetization over the time course of an MRI experiment. The MRI signal is typically measured from free water, but it carries the signature of the interactions the water protons have evolved through. Hence “free water” relaxation globally reflects on multiple contributions of different types of protons, including water protons in different magnetic environments and other exchanging non water protons. This explains why MRI is so versatile in providing soft tissue contrast and why it has become particularly useful to distinguish various physio-pathological processes in clinical applications. It also underlines that magnetization transfer (MT) effects (in their broad meaning) are important driving mechanisms of relaxation in biological tissues.The binary spin bath (BSB) model consists of a single water pool in exchange with a single motion-restricted macromolecular proton pool. It is the most commonly used model to describe MT MRI signal and contrast. Whereas the usual Bloch equations apply to water protons, motion-restricted protons shall be modeled differently. They have a residual dipolar interaction which leads to the consideration of an additional magnetization order, the dipolar order, to describe the magnetization dynamics of the spin system. Dipolar order is coupled with the Zeeman order under off-resonance RF irradiation according to the Provotorov theory of RF saturation and shall be accounted for in the BSB model when accounting for off-resonance MT irradiation. Of interest the coupling between Zeeman and dipolar order vanishes for on-resonance excitation or when a symmetric dual-sided off-resonance RF irradiation is applied. This is the origin of the inhomogeneous MT (ihMT) technique which isolates the dipolar order contribution to the MT effects by comparing single- and dual-offset MT experiments. Since dipolar order has its own longitudinal relaxation time, T1D, with specific sensitivity to slow motions (kHz range), ihMT provides access to a new source of contrast in vivo. ihMT has found applications in neuroimaging studies because of its high signal specificity for myelin.

• November 28, 2025: François-Xavier Theillet, CITCoM, Université Paris Cité, France, "In-cell structural biology using NMR: overview and latest developments", In-cell structural biology by NMR is appealing in many regards: Among others, it permits to investigate protein conformations or ligand binding/processing in very relevant conditions, i.e., in cells. First, I will briefly describe the experimental conditions, and give an overview of the contributions and limits of in-cell NMR.Then focusing on our work, I will explain how we try to make in-cell NMR more amenable and more biologically relevant. We established novel sample production protocols, which enable facile in situ expression with amino acid specific labeling in mammalian cells. We tailored new NMR pulse sequences allowing the characterization of amyloid proteins (a-synuclein, Tau) and cancer-related protein targets (kinases) at low concentrations (below 20 uM/100 ug) in live cells. These methods are now close to be ready for characterizing live spheroids and organoids.                                                  

• December 5 : Lauriane Lecoq, IBCP, Lyon 

• January 16, 2025, Irene Marco Rius, IBE Barcelona, Spain

• January 23, 2025, Benjamin Tatman, IST, Austria

• February 20, 2026, Michael Ryan Hansen, Uiversity of Münster, Germany