NMR-Solver: automated structure elucidation via large-scale spectral matching and physics-guided fragment optimization

Abstract

Abstract Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) spectroscopy is one of the most powerful and widely used tools for molecular structure elucidation in organic chemistry. However, the interpretation of NMR spectra to determine unknown molecular structures remains a labor-intensive and expertise-dependent process, particularly for complex or novel compounds. Although recent methods have been proposed for molecular structure elucidation, they often underperform in real-world applications due to inherent algorithmic limitations and limited high-quality data. Here, we present NMR-Solver, a practical and interpretable framework for the automated determination of small organic molecule structures from 1 H and 13 C NMR spectra. Our method introduces an automated framework for molecular structure elucidation, integrating large-scale spectral matching with physics-guided molecular optimization that exploits atomic-level structure–spectrum relationships in NMR. We evaluate NMR-Solver on simulated benchmarks, curated experimental data from the literature, and real-world experiments, demonstrating its strong generalization, robustness, and practical utility in real-life scenarios. By integrating computational NMR analysis, deep learning, and interpretable chemical reasoning into a unified system, it facilitates scalable, automated, and chemically meaningful molecular structure elucidation, establishing a generalizable paradigm for solving inverse problems in molecular science.