ABSTRACT

The explosive growth of combinatorial chemistry has fostered a number of innovative approaches to automating this intrinsically repetitive discipline. Since its birth in the 1980’s, the laboratory automation industry has made great strides providing solutions for applications involving liquid transfer, quantitative sampling, filtration and solid phase extraction (SPE); operations currently performed manually by combinatorial chemistry laboratories. Automation establishes consistency in the synthesis and screening of compounds, frees the scientist from the mundane aspects of the process, and channels scarce resources toward more productive arenas demanding human attention. This paper explores automation from the perspective of benchtop systems specifically designed for combinatorial chemistry.