Missing connections

The user of smartnotebook will most likely suspect a missing connection when no logical extension to the current chain exists when one is expected. See the figure below. Missing connections are going to happen, it is important for the user to be familiar with this section.

  1. First, ask yourself how confident you are with the current chain. Were there reasonable alternatives that you did not explore while you built the chain? You should really check these out first and make sure they don't lead to the correct solution.

  2. Consider the possibility that one of the chemical shifts can be reasonably assigned outside the default chemical shift range. Try moving the standard deviation slider of the best fit window to a bit higher level and re-do the connection search. You are hoping for a match that allows you to add several more connections to the chain. Then your assignment of that particular chemical shift becomes believable.

  3. Is it possible that the connection chains back to itself? Smartnotebook is just not capable of handling this worst case scenario for overlap.

  4. If the above has failed, you now have to seriously consider that there is a mistake in peakpicking. Smartnotebook provides no tools for finding missing peakpicks, however nmrview provides some. You could work with the nmrview windows currently provided (or create new ones) and manually flip through planes of spectral data looking for the missing connectivity. If you find the correct pattern, turn on the peak labels and see which peak or peaks didn't get picked. These peaks need to be added to your input peakpick files!

    If the peaks have been picked make sure the values are close to being correct. It is possible that what visually looks like a correct pattern is just outside the pattern error tolerance. Correcting the peak that is slightly off will fix the problem. If the peak picking is close then perhaps the software has erred. I will look at such an example if you send me a screen snapshot of the labelled spectra and the relevant parts of the peakpick files. At this point you have no choice but to manually create the missing connection.

  5. If you cannot find the pattern even with manual methods, consider the case that the peaks are overlapped to be indetectable. Consider your experiment set and whether there are any conditions which explain why the peaks are not detectable.

    If you are updating peaklists, you must either restart snb or go to the Configure/Update window .


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Questions to: bionmrwebmaster@biochem.ualberta.ca