What is Combinatorial Chemistry?
Combinatorial chemistry is a technique that adapts SPPS to the construction of large libraries of structurally related molecules as mixtures in the same reaction vessel or individually by parallel semi-mechanical synthesis. The technique developed mostly on the heels of medicinal chemistry where the desire to map and bind receptors became painfully slow at the hands of traditional chemistry methods. In summary, more purified receptors and enzymes were being isolated, cloned and expressed than chemists could devise inhibitors for! To address this information void, a group of chemists devised an extension of SPPS where it was thought that the two simple reactions used for peptide building could be expanded to a larger reaction repertoire. The net goal of Combinatorial Chemistry, therefore, is to simultaneously produce many compounds with defined structure. As mentioned, Combinatorial Chemistry takes its lead from nature, which uses a limited number of naturally-occurring amino acids (20)