Treatment of Peak Intensity Uncertainties in NMR Relaxation Data Analysis Can Lead to Severe Artifacts

Summary. Accurate estimations of experimental uncertainties of relaxation rates are of vital importance for the interpretation of relaxation data, in particular for the Lipari-Szabo “model free” approach and for comparative relaxation studies. Here we report a systematic investigation of different methods for the estimation of experimental uncertainties on longitudinal R 1 and transversal R 2 rates using two different schemes for sampling the rates. We show that certain combinations of sampling strategies and methods of estimating experimental uncertainties result in wrong rates and rate errors. Practical recommendations for obtaining proper rate and rate uncertainties are deduced.