Organised chaos promoted by French researchers

Organised chaos is being promoted by French researchers in order to find new chemical reactions.

The new concept has been published in the journal Angewandte Chemie, which is based on antibodies and a "sandwich" immunoassay. The basic principle is that most discoveries are made by chance, but if there was a way to help this system along by increasing the number of experiments, then more discoveries would be made.

Help-throughput screening has become an established technique within the chemistry sphere. Randomly mixing substances together to see what happens can work well if carried out systematically and on a large scale. This technique is often used in the search for pharmaceutical agents and catalysts, but is certainly not the finished product.

Researchers now use the concept in a broader manner when searching for new chemical reactions. This is particularly true in the search for new, easier, faster, or more elegant synthetic pathways for natural products, specialty chemicals, and drugs.

This is where the French scientists step in. Led by Frédéric Taran from the Institute of Biology and Technology, Saclay, iBiTec-S, Gif-sur-Yvette, the team of researchers have now developed a new immunoassay-based approach to searching for new coupling reactions that link two organic molecules together.

The technique works by adding to reactants to the wells of a microtiter plate. One of the reactors carries a marker that is recognized and bound by an antibody, and the other reactant carries a marker for a separate antibody. If a coupling occurs, the product has both markers. Once the reaction takes place, the solutions are transferred to new plates that are coated with AK1.

Once they have been through the washing step, only molecules with a binding site for AK1 remain on the plate. The same processes is conducted using AK2 binds.

The result is a 'sandwich' in which the product is the filling between two antibody 'slices' of bread. Successful reactions are made visible by an enzyme that is bound to AK2 and causes the colour to change to yellow.