Chemistry Reference
In-Depth Information
As described in the following sidebar, the result is a family of related
chemicals, ready to be tested.
Combinatorial chemistry produces hundreds or possibly thousands
of candidate compounds to screen for the desired properties. One may
fi t the bill, or come close, in which case it may be further modifi ed and
retested. Drug manufacturers oft en use combinatorial chemistry in
conjunction with other methods to create testable candidates for me-
dicinal activity. Th e section titled “Hitting the Target—Discovering and
Designing New Medications” on page 25 describes drug development
and design in more detail.
Other scientists besides biomedical researchers have employed
combinatorial chemistry. In 1995, X.-D. Xiang and Peter G. Schultz,
then at the University of California, Berkeley, and their colleagues pub-
lished a paper in
Science
describing a pioneering application of this
technique in materials research. As described in “A Combinatorial Ap-
proach to Materials Discovery,” Schultz and his colleagues performed
parallel synthesis—a lot of reactions at the same time—to make an ar-
CombinatorialChemistry
The advantage of combinatorial chemistry is in the large num-
ber of combinations that even a small number of chemicals
can form. Chemists often start by attaching molecules to tiny
plastic beads, or placing them in a solution contained within
small wells on a plate, and then begin to add other chemicals.
The chemicals may be amines (derived from ammonia, NH
3
),
hydrocarbons (molecules of carbon and hydrogen), carboxylic
acids (containing a COOH group), or many others.
Consider, for instance, chemicals X, Y, and Z. Attach X
to the beads, then expose the beads to solutions containing
the three chemicals, and allow a reaction to occur. The prod-
ucts will be X-X (chemical X reacted with itself), X-Y, and X-Z.
Repeat the process with these products, which is simple
and effi cient because it is the same process as before, so
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