Combinatorial chemistry: a basic necessity inspired by nature's own approaches

This chapter focuses on combinatorial chemistry. The synthesis of small peptides, derived from larger peptides is realized using peptide chemistry and a development in this area, which turned out to be especially important for the synthesis of peptides and recently for the advent of combinatorial chemistry is the ability to synthesize peptides on small resin beads, that is, solid-phase peptide synthesis. Solid phase synthesis has the advantage of being able to drive a reaction to completion by using excess of reagents, which can be washed away again after completion of the reaction. Other by-products or impurities remaining in solution during solid-phase synthesis can be removed as well by washing the resin. A great advantage of synthesis in solution is that the compounds are immediately available for screening and do not have to be cleaved from a solid-phase resin. In the split-mix method large libraries can be obtained by dividing (splitting) a quantity of resin in several portions followed by reaction of each of the portions with a different compound. Combinatorial chemistry is considered as a basic necessity for the generation of compounds in the pharmaceutical industry