It has been thirteen years since Prasanna “AP” de Silva and his colleagues at Queen’s University Belfast published their first paper in the international science journal Nature, outlining how they hoped to convert small molecules into the kind of logical units that could carry out computations. In the September issue of Reactive Reports, we explain how this work has now led to the first practical application of logical chemistry and provided combinatorial chemists with a way to add a unique tag to potentially millions of molecules in parallel.
Combichem uses a set of chemical building blocks to synthesize a vast library of new molecules by building them up in all possible combinations of the building blocks. But, tagging each molecule has always been a stalling point. De Silva’s work could release the bottleneck. Read all about logical molecular tags in the new issue of RR.
Also, in this month’s issue, Peter Loew is featured . Peter is managing director of chemoinformatics software company InfoChem. There have been a lot of changes in the IT world since InfoChem was formed in 1989 and Loew revealed how these changes have evolved the company: Read the full interview.