Hence, a significant fraction of the water in muscle has structural properties such as hydrogen bonding that are much different from bulk water. In all of the materials, two dielectric absorption peaks are observed, one peak around 100MHz and the other around 20 GHz. Hence, the bound water correlation times are 125 times larger than those of the free water. In addition to lowering the freezing point and and slowing the molecular motions, the presence of the interface is accompanied by preferential orientation of the water molecules with respect to the surface. When the interface exhibits long-range order, splittings in the NMR spectrum of water can be observed.
Preferential orientation appears to be a general characteristic of interfacial water molecules.
NMR observation of it is facilitated when the interface has long-range orientational order. Copyright 2000 University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas, All Rights Reserved.