NMR and IR are information rich techniques and are generally used during the process of designing and optimising the reaction conditions for library production while HPLC, MS but especially LC-MS are used for quality control of the final library. With the available MS soft ionisation techniques short times of analysis yield up to 400 samples a day, and with the next generation of these instruments, the throughput will be multiplied by a factor of ten. Both automation and the information science have the right state of the art technology to support this jump. With the advent of short and highly efficient columns, LC-techniques have dramatically cut down the analysis times (up to 100-150 samples a day). Semi-preparative version of these columns are also available for sample purification before the biological tests. Moreover the possibility to run parallel analysis with instruments operating on 2 or more columns will, in the near future, increase the efficiency of this technique. CZE (Capillary Zone Electrophoresis) is far to be fully exploited in this field but the possibility to reduce the amount of solvents and samples makes it an attractive technology to be developed in the future. NMR and IR are technologically ready for being routinely used in the high throughput format but the complexity of the data generated at the moment is preventing the possibility to have an automated and reliable data analysis system. In case of solid-phase library production, the application of on bead-IR and HR-MAS NMR techniques will give information for the choice of resin, solvent and reaction condition and the throughput will be higher with the use of sample changer for the MAS probes. If the libraries are of solution-state samples, the large number of compounds could be analysed with automated high-throughput NMR spectroscopy using a LC-NMR probe but the interpretation of the collected data is still a bottleneck. Moreover the amount of information these techniques can generate and the potentiality to run analysis on resins and even in the reaction tubes makes them widely employed in combinatorial chemistry.
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