Design, synthesis and biological screening of combinatorial chemical libraries

Abstract

Although combinatorial libraries owe their inception to applications in peptide and bacteriophage libraries, the breadth of current applications include solution phase chemical reaction optimization, material science investigation, natural products modifications, and agricultural research. As a conceptual application, combinatorial library techniques can enhance a researcher's ability to transcend beyond the examination of one or several compounds to that of thousands or millions of these species simultaneously. The work described here, limited to scaffolded combinatorial chemical libraries, focuses primarily on the design and synthesis of these systems and how they have been analyzed against biological targets. Of the three scaffolded libraries, two were developed from aromatic templates (3,5-diaminobenzoic acid and 1,2,4-benzenetricarboxylic acid) while the last was built upon the cyclohexyl, Kemp's triacid platform. Although these libraries did not provide compounds with high affinity for the receptors investigated, they served to improve the understanding of combinatorial chemistry as a practice.