At the forefront of new synthetic endeavors, such as drug discovery or natural product synthesis, large quantities of material are rarely available and timelines are tight. In this space, high throughput experimentation (HTE) can play a major role in quickly and efficiently arriving at optimized reaction conditions. However, carrying out material sparing, automated, miniaturized chemistry is not easily compatible with the presence of solids or volatile organic solvents, so most of the synthetic “toolkit” cannot be readily miniaturized. We have developed a platform which demonstrates proof-of-concept for miniaturization and automation of HTE, which when coupled with emerging high throughput analysis mass-spectrometric techniques, can rapidly execute 1536 chemistry experiments in 1 day using as little as 0.02 mg of material per reaction.

See also Science, 2015, 347, 49 (link)