Mapping the dark space of chemical reactions with extended nanomole synthesis and MALDI-TOF MS

Understanding the practical limitations of chemical reactions is critically important for efficiently planning the synthesis of compounds in pharmaceutical, agrochemical, and specialty chemical research and development. However, literature reports of the scope of new reactions are often cursory and biased toward successful results, severely limiting the ability to predict reaction outcomes for untested substrates. We herein illustrate strategies for carrying out large-scale surveys of chemical reactivity by using a material-sparing nanomole-scale automated synthesis platform with greatly expanded synthetic scope combined with ultrahigh-throughput matrix-assisted laser desorption/ionization-time-of-flight mass spectrometry (MALDI-TOF MS).