Radial Approach to the Automated Synthesis of Small Molecules
Abstract
A recent survey found that not only had more than 85% of chemists failed to reproduce a published procedure, 60% had failed to reproduce their own. While the majority of scientific disciplines rely on the availability of instrumentation, chemistry is traditionally performed in standardized and widely available glass batch reactors. This is a distinct advantage, as researchers from a breadth of economic backgrounds can study chemical transformations, perform syntheses, and be scientifically competitive. However, this approach to chemistry gives the field a unique limitation as compared to other disciplines; it is highly reliant on the physical skills of the researcher. So while this means chemistry as a discipline is accessible to researchers worldwide, there is often a large degree of variance in the results of those experiments, leading to this reproducibility problem in the field. Issues with respect to reproducibility can be reduced via automation of flow chemical reactors. Automation has the additional advantage of greatly increasing the rate with which individual chemical processes can be studied/developed, however these instruments are only available in a few, isolated laboratories Ð limiting worldwide participation. The development of chemistry remains a labor-intensive process fueled by intuition and trial-and-error. In this talk, we will discuss the progress my group has made in the development of remotely accessible automated flow platforms for the standardized production of chemical data. This project has seen the development of a radial synthesizer, capable of single and multistep reactions, and is the first instrument which does not require manual reconfiguration of the instrument between experiments. Taking advantage of the lack of equipment redundancies in iterative synthesizers and the versatility exhibited by synthesizers using a linear series of reactors, we have achieved several multi-step linear and convergent syntheses as well as generating a library of derivative structures. The instrument has numerous capabilities not possible on standard automated flow equipment, including a variable flow rate, storage of intermediates, stop-flow, and reactor reuse under different conditions. The modular nature accommodates additional modules for expansion of the available reaction environments.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Apr 01, 2019
- Source ID
- W911NF1610557
Entities
People
- Kerry M. Gilmore
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Max Planck Society
- Office of the Secretary of Defense