A Fluorescence-Based, Rationally Designed High-Throughput Screening Tool for Catalysts of Michael Addition

Abstract

To develop effective chemical catalysts is one of the biggest concerns in organic chemistry. Recent progress in combinatorial chemistry has generated large libraries of candidate catalysts, but their activities and the optimized reaction conditions are still examined by using HPLC and GC, which take a lot of time. Therefore, high-throughput screening (HTS) systems for catalysts are urgently required.
Here we present a rationally designed fluorescence probe as a HTS tool for evaluation of the activities of candidate catalysts and for optimizing reaction conditions in the Michael addition as shown below. Our novel HTS tool allows evaluation of the activity of chemical catalysts simply by measuring the fluorescence of the reaction mixture.