Recent advances in analytical construct resins

The area of solid-phase synthesis has witnessed exponential growth in the last fifteen years, but difficulties associated with the monitoring and analysis of resin-bound reactions and products have been apparent due to a limited number of analytical methods available. With the substrate tethered to an insoluble support traditional chromatographic monitoring is only possible after cleavage. In order to address this 'analytical bottleneck' Geysen, in 1996 elaborated Merrifield's initial dual linker strategy by incorporating an encoding system between two in-line linkers. These analytical construct resins represented a new approach for both the quality control of solid-phase combinatorial libraries and for the development of new synthetic sequences on solid-support. This review will summarize the development and application of analytical construct resins focusing on recent applications of the technology.