Authors: Artem I. Leonov, Alexander J. S. Hammer, Slawomir Lach, S. Hessam M. Mehr, Dario Caramelli, Davide Angelone, Aamir Khan, Steven O’Sullivan, Matthew Craven, Liam Wilbraham, Leroy Cronin
Published: 2024-02-09
DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45444-3
Source: Full article
AbstractRobotic platforms for chemistry are developing rapidly but most systems are not currently able to adapt to changing circumstances in real-time. We present a dynamically programmable system capable of making, optimizing, and discovering new molecules which utilizes seven sensors that continuously monitor the reaction. By developing a dynamic programming language, we demonstrate the 10-fold scale-up of a highly exothermic oxidation reaction, end point detection, as well as detecting critical hardware failures. We also show how the use of in-line spectroscopy such as HPLC, Raman, and NMR can be used for closed-loop optimization of reactions, exemplified using Van Leusen oxazole synthesis, a four-component Ugi condensation and manganese-catalysed epoxidation reactions, as well as two previously unreported reactions, discovered from a selected chemical space, providing up to 50% yield improvement over 25–50 iterations. Finally, we demonstrate an experimental pipeline to explore a trifluoromethylations reaction space, that discovers new molecules.