Organic Combinatorial Chemistry: Concepts, Terms and Basic Techniques

摘要

In conclusion, combinatorial chemistry is apparently the antithesis of traditional organic chemistry, where one single compound is prepared and great care is taken to ensure that both intermediates and products are pure and fully characterized. Combinatorial chemistry began as an application to the drug discovery: at present, the technique of the libraries are applicable to the search for the new useful properties of compounds in the broader sense. Reports appear that apply the library tecniques described here to material science, catalyst design, metal chelation, and molecular recognition. For example, combinatorial arrays of inorganic salts to create a spatially defined thin film of potential superconducting composites was recently reported as well as applications of combinatorial libraries to preparation of new catalysts. However, combinatorial chemistry is not simply a preference for quantity over quality: in fact, to ensure useful results, a combinatorial library has to be well designed and created using optimized methods. In the past, split-and-recombine approaches give rise to millions of compounds very rapidly. Nevertheless, the uncertainties of finding and identifying an active compound within these mixtures become more challenging as the size of the mixture increases. The future challenge is therefore to design and build libraries that contain useful compounds with a wide diversity of molecular size, shape and functional groups, while keeping the number of compounds small.