Meeting of the Central European NMR Discussion Groups
This annual regional conference in the field of NMR spectroscopy was held from 26 to 28 April in its traditional location, Valtice castle, in the Czech Republic, very close to the Austrian border. During the past decade this event has evolved from a national meeting into the most important annual NMR conference in this central European region, organised jointly by the Czech “Discussion Group Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy of the Spectroscopic Society of Johannes Marcus Marci” and the “Working Party Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy” of the Austrian Chemical Society (AG-NMR d. GÖCh).
This year the active participants came from institutions in eight different European countries. In some important aspects this well-organised meeting, which is supported by major international NMR manufacturers and suppliers, does not follow the well-beaten tracks of many other NMR conferences. In particular, the wealth of seemingly disparate topics such as ab initio calculations of chemical shifts and coupling constants, multi-dimensional biomolecular NMR, organic and inorganic chemistry applications and single point-imaging in material science gives a unique overview of the activities in the field. The nearly 50 short oral presentations give an excellent opportunity for young researchers to present their results on an equal footing with established scientists. These features together with the informal atmosphere of the meeting in a highly stimulating environment (declared a world cultural heritage site by UNESCO) have made this conference a fixed item in the annual conference schedule of many NMR researchers in Central Europe.
Further details on the conference are available at http://www.chemi.muni.cz/nmr/radek/nmrvaltice/nmrvaltice.htm .
Professor Dr Norbert Mueller
Institute of Chemistry, Johannes Kepler University, A-4040 Linz, Austria
e-mail: norbert.mueller@jk.uni-linz.ac.at,
http://www.orc.uni-linz.ac.at/