(1023-B) Unambiguous Reproduction of Chemical Protocols using a Chemical Description Language on General Robotic Synthesis Hardware

Abstract: The chemical synthesis literature is rapidly expanding, but widely validating new processes, procedures, and reactions still takes a substantial amount of time. This is because cultural and practical barriers effectively limit the rate at which new processes can be safely and critically evaluated. What is needed is an approach to unambiguously and precisely transmit chemical synthesis protocols between different laboratories, hardware types, and standards. Herein, we present an approach to encode and execute synthetic procedures on different hardware and in different laboratories.
Harnessing the power of abstraction, our approach efficiently compresses research workflows and chemical knowledge, facilitating the subdivision and distribution of tasks like reaction optimisation and validation to different laboratories. The results can then be streamed to a central site for assembly. Simultaneously, validated protocols can be rapidly communicated in collaborative networks to increase the throughput of a process by number-up (more synthesis nodes) rather than scale-up (larger synthesis facility). This strategy is demonstrated with a convergent, multi-step synthetic procedure alongside divergent synthesis problems which utilise the combined benefits of different hardware types to create and validate diverse molecular libraries.