AUTOMATED COMBINATORIAL CHEMISTRY ON SOLID-PHASE

High-speed solid-phase synthesis of diverse, non-peptidyl small organi c molecules in a spatially dispersed combinatorial library format is a ccomplished with the OntoBLOCK system. This proprietary automation sys tem supports reagent introduction and removal, agitation, inert atmosp here, temperature control, pressure control, and vacuum drying. Genera l purpose reaction blocks are moved along an assembly line and are pro cessed by various task-specific workstations. Compounds are cleaved fr om each of the 96 individual reaction vessels of the reaction block di rectly into the wells of a standard 96-well microtiter plate. These pl ates, with one compound per well, are readily accepted into automated high-throughput screening systems. A customized mass spectrometer proc esses the microtiter plates and produces a mass spectrum for each comp ound. Synthesis of compounds in the OntoBLOCK system is driven by inst rument control language (ICL) scripts. Client/server database software for inventory control, experiment design, instrument control, and dat a analysis is written in Visual Basic and Oracle7. (C) 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.