ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

NMR spectra database

Hi kiddo, today we're going to talk about NMR spectra database. NMR stands for Nuclear Magnetic Resonance. It's a fancy way of saying that scientists use magnets to take pictures of tiny things so they can learn more about them.

Think about a big playground with lots of children. Each child has a different color shirt. Scientists want to know what color shirt each child is wearing, so they ask the children to walk by a big camera. The camera takes a picture of each child's shirt and puts it on a computer.

Similarly, in the world of molecules, scientists use magnets to take pictures of different parts of a molecule. They can use these pictures to figure out what the molecule looks like and how it behaves. These pictures are called NMR spectra.

Now, imagine that scientists take pictures of a lot of different molecules, and they save all those pictures on a computer. That's what an NMR spectra database is. It's a big collection of all these pictures that scientists can use to help identify molecules they've never seen before.

Just like how you can look at the picture of a shirt to know what color it is, scientists can look at the pictures in an NMR spectra database to figure out what kind of molecule they're looking at. It's like having a big book with pictures of all the different children on the playground with all their different colored shirts.

So, in conclusion, an NMR spectra database is a big collection of pictures taken by magnets that help scientists figure out what molecules look like and how they behave. It's like a big book of pictures that scientists use to help identify new molecules they've never seen before.