Exploring New Reactions with an Accessible High-throughput Screening (Open-HTS) Chemical Robotic System

Abstract

High-throughput screening offers the potential to expedite labor-intensive experiments more efficiently. In this work, we developed a cost-effective, versatile, and high-throughput microfluidic-based chemical robotic system (Open-HTS) which accomplishes reaction discovery, optimization of reaction conditions, and evaluation of substrate scope with a zoom-in convergent strategy. We demonstrated that 9 hits of new reactions were discovered by exploring 3920 reactions at the time scale of 1.2 min per reaction with this chemical robot. Further automatic optimization and evaluation on chemical parameters, scale, and substrate scopes were conducted for the newly discovered nitrile hydration reaction. This platform can be easily accessed and accelerates reaction discovery conducted by a traditional synthetic laboratory.