Arthur Roberts

Q. Please introduce yourself to the readers of the NMR software blog.
A. I am a project scientist at the School of Pharmacy at the University of California San Diego (UCSD). I was hired to bring some novel NMR technology that I developed at the University of Washington to UCSD.
I worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry at the University of Washington and at Washington State University. I started my career as an EPR spectroscopist, where we built instruments. I have been doing NMR, since 2003.
Currently I study the process of drug metabolism, which happens to be the main road block for drug development. We hope that our research will lead to drugs of higher efficacy and fewer side effects. We are developing NMR technology that will allow us to rapidly determine drug bound structures and will speed drug development. We have developed a variety of NMR pulse programs for this purpose.
We do Paramagnetic protein NMR. We also do NMR simulations and write NMR pulse programs.

Q. Which NMR software are you using now?
A. Topspin 2.1 and iNMR 3.15.

Q. Which other NMR software have you used in the past?
A. VNMRJ, Spinworks, Sparky, NMRpipe, MestreC, xwinnmr, and MestreNova

Q. How do you rate iNMR?
A. In terms of NMR software, it is the best in terms of ease of use and power.

iNMR
It can process 1D, 2D, and 3D. Easy to use and powerful. It can read multiple formats and can convert files to ascii. The graphics are also very nice. No apparent bugs.
Topspin
It can process 1D, 2D, and 3D. Also powerful, but not very easy to use. I need my data converted to ascii for analysis with other programs and I could not find a way to do it with this software. It can only read Bruker formats.
Mestre-C
It can process 1D and 2D data. Powerful and easy to use, but a little buggy. For 2D, the conversion to ascii is not ideal.
NMRpipe
It can process 1D and 2D data. Not as powerful as the above programs and very clumsy to use. No easy way to convert data to ascii. It is also very slow.
MestreNova
It can process at least 1D and 2D. Powerful and easy to use, but slow, very slow. I found no easy way to convert my 2D spectra to ascii. Also, several useful features were removed from MestreC for this version.
VNMRJ
It can process 1D and 2D. Not as good as Topspin, but equally difficult. This software can not convert to ascii or read other file formats.
Spinworks
It can process 1D and 2D. It is fairly easy to use, but not as powerful as the software above. It is also quite buggy.

This is how I rate all the software and I tested a lot of NMR software:
iNMR > Topspin > Mestre-C > xwinnmr > MestreNova > Spinworks > Sparky > NMRpipe

Q. Is iNMR enough for your needs?
A. Yes, it does everything that I need including processing 3D data sets and it does it fast. It allows me to read files that I produced at the University of Washington on a Varian Unity Inova and the Bruker Avance III at the University of California San Diego. It allows me to convert files to ascii, so that I can do singular value decomposition of it with a scientific analysis program that we use. It produces publication-quality graphics. It is also very easy to use, so I don't need to spend a lot of time training graduate students or other postdocs on how to use it. I also didn't have to spend a lot of time learning it myself. I can't imagine a lab without it.