Automation combinatorial library synthesis

This simple and versatile combinatorial one-pot method will surely provide, in future, many diverse libraries, and its use in combination with solution purification techniques (see the next sections) will help in automating the experimental procedures. A thorough search for new multicomponent condensations should even increase their applications in combinatorial library synthesis. 

Some companies (75, 76) have developed their own automated instruments for combinatorial library synthesis in solution to produce large, purified arrays of discretes (up to several tens of thousands of individuals) the available information is obviously scarce, but an example of such a proprietary integrated synthesizer will be presented in section 8.2.6. 

Gaecia-Egido, E., Spikmans, V., Wong, S. Y. E., Warrington, B. H., Synthesis and analysis of combinatorial libraries performed in an automated micro-reactor system. Lab. Chip 3 (2003) bl-TL. 

Parallel processing of synthetic operations has been one of the cornerstones of medicinal and high-throughput synthesis for years. In the parallel synthesis of compound libraries, compounds are synthesized using ordered arrays of spatially separated reaction vessels adhering to the traditional one vessel/one compound philosophy. The defined location of the compound in the array provides the structure of the compound. A commonly used format for parallel synthesis is the 96-well microtiter plate, and today combinatorial libraries comprising hundreds to thousands of compounds can be synthesized by parallel synthesis, often in an automated fashion. 

Khmelnitsky and coworkers have also examined microwave-assisted parallel Hantzsch pyridine synthesis [28], They have demonstrated the benefits of microwave irradiation in a 96-well plate reactor for high throughput, automated production of a pyridine combinatorial library (Scheme 8.20). 

The simplicity of these transformations and high yields in both steps indicate that the preparation of compounds of type 106 from 1, 2 can easily be automated and performed as liquid phase parallel synthesis. The starting materials 1,2 can also be put on a polymer support to obtain combinatorial libraries of l,l -di-, l,r,2 -tri-, l,l, 2, 2 -tetra-, l,r,2, 3 -tetra-, l,r,2, 2, 3 -penta- and... 

In general, solid-phase synthesis, rather than solution-phase synthesis, can be the preferred method for the generation of combinatorial libraries because of the greater abihty to automate a solid-phase protocol, primarily due to the use of excess reagents in solution to effect cleaner reactions and to the ease of workup by simple filtration. The solid-phase method of peptide synthesis has had many notable successes. However, the preparation of peptides containing more than 20 amino acids in length using the solid-phase technique often causes major problems in that very extensive purification of the final product is needed. 

The split-and-pool synthesis not only simplifies the complexity of the combinatorial synthetic process, but also offers additional important benefits. To undertake a full range of solid-phase chemical reactions, elaborate reaction conditions are needed for some chemical transformations. These include, but are not limited to, low temperature and inert atmosphere conditions. Parallel synthesis of a thousand compounds requires handling of a thousand reaction vessels. The timely addition of sensitive reagents (e.g., butyl lithium) at low temperature (—78°) under inert atmosphere during parallel synthesis is not a trivial task. It can be done if sophisticated automated synthesizer equipment is designed to handle and tolerate such reaction conditions. Such a synthesis can alternatively be performed easily in a manual fashion using a split-and-pool method that requires only a limited number of reaction vessels. Examples from Nicolaou s17 and Schrei-ber s18,19 laboratories have shown that the split-and-pool method is the methodology of choice for the synthesis of complex and diversity-oriented combinatorial libraries. 

Automated synthesis of peptide and oligonucleotide libraries was initiated about 10 years ago [4], Within the last three years, there has been much attention focused on the generation of combinatorial libraries of small molecules. As with biopolymers, the use of solid resin support was central to the advance of this field. In solid-phase synthesis, one of the reactants is covalently bound to the solid support and an excess of the other reactants may be used in each step to drive reactions to completion. Purification of the intermediates and final product is easily achieved through extensive washing of the resin after each chemical step. For the purpose of high throughput synthesis, cleavage of the final... 

Recent literature contains a multitude of examples of synthetic organic methodologies which have been optimized and applied to the solid-phase synthesis of combinatorial libraries [2]. In fact, the production of a number of these libraries has been realized on such systems as the Multipin SPOC [8], the DIVERSOMER [9] and the OntoBLOCK [10], All three apparatuses allow the automated production of spatially dispersed combinatorial libraries and facilitate the isolation, identification, screening and archiving of single compounds in distinct physical locations which are crucial factors during lead discovery and optimization. 

Using the Multipin SPOC systems, researchers at Chiron have demonstrated the automated solid-phase synthesis of peptoids 1 (Scheme 1) [12], while Ellman and co-workers have completed the synthesis of a combinatorial library of 11 200 spatially dispersed benzodiazepines 2 (Scheme 2) [13],... 

The repetitive nature of oligomeric synthesis has enabled the rapid implementation of solid-phase and automated methods for DNA [20,21,85,86] and peptide combinatorial libraries. Using these systems for the synthesis of single compounds or mixtures of compounds, multiple reaction vessels numbering 8 [45], 15 [80], 20 [59], 24 [50], 25 [57,58], 36 [53-55,77-79], 48 [26,39-41], or 96 [42-44] can be manipulated. Only a few of these systems enable automated resin mixing and splitting within the instrument to generate mixtures of compounds [53,59,78,87,88],... 

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