Hunting for better catalysts and materials-combinatorial chemistry and high throughput technology

Combinatorial chemistry and high throughput experimentation are key words, which represent a new field of chemistry, where through systematic combination of building blocks or chemical elements large numbers of new compounds are generated, characterized and tested in an automated fashion. It contradicts the conventional one-at-a-time approach by allowing the highly parallelized or rapid sequential study of hundreds, even thousands of molecules or materials in a single experiment. It offers to save time and costs for research and development. High throughput experimentation is rapidly entering industrial laboratories, while academia still remains hesitant and even opposed. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.