Late last year Prof Mike Gilson sent me a Science paper that reported "boosted mobility" of molecules during reactions. The conclusions were based in part on DOSY experiments and since the reported increases were greater than expected, Prof Gilson was interested in a second opinion on the NMR experiments. As I started looking at the data a technical comment disputing the results, and a response from the original authors was published. The original group then published another paper addressing the problems raised by the second group and made their raw NMR data freely available. A few weeks ago the second group published a preprint where they argue the first group's data was not analysed correctly and the conclusions are invalid. In this post I'll go through the data from both groups, my own analysis of the data, and try to make some sense of it all.
