Encoded combinatorial library materials

While considerable efforts have been spent in the past few years in the field of solid supports for combinatorial chemistry [73], most of them were devoted to modified polystyrenic beads with different sizes, loadings or swelling properties [74], or carrying different functionalities or linkers for library synthesis [75], or to solid supports different from resin beads (pins [76], cellulose [77], soluble supports [78], and so on). Few reports dealt with labelled solid supports prepared by chemical reactions (see the previous paragraphs) and significant efforts in the field of material sciences to obtain intrinsically labeled, nonchemically encoded, easily readable, combinatorial solid supports have not been reported. 

The enormous potential of this technique is evident from the above brief descriptions, which highlighted the many ideal properties of such encoding in terms of ease, reliability, inertness and robustness, automation, complete compatibility with any biological assay, and so on. No apparent drawbacks can be found, except maybe for the lack of expertise in this field by combinatorial and organic chemists and their reluctance in getting involved in material science. Examples of applications of these, or of similar approaches where the solid support is intrinsically and nonchemically encoded, to real large encoded organic molecule libraries should appear in the near future, and will hopefully increase the interest of the combinatorial community toward these techniques. 

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