COMBINATORICS OF COMBINATORIAL CHEMISTRY

The hot topic among medicinal chemists today is a novel technique for chemical synthesis in drug research called combinatorial chemistry, wh ere usually a core structure and some building-block molecules are giv en and all combinatorially possible combinations are produced. The res ulting set of compounds (called a library) can afterwards be systemati cally screened for a desired biological activity. In this paper we dis cuss the applications of the mathematical discipline of combinatorics to this process, especially an algorithm for the exhaustive and redund ancy-free generation of a combinatorial library as well as equations f or the enumeration of library sizes.