Screening combinatorial libraries

Combinatorial chemistry has taken the pharmaceutical industry by storm, and is now widely applied at the leading edge of the drug discovery process. An approach to quickly survey structural space, combinatorial chemistry has stimulated development of a plethora of methodologies to rapidly address the relationship of drug structure and activity. Reviewed here are the various pooling strategies presently being employed. The use of microorganisms in library screening, as well as DNA array screening, are also reviewed. In addition, both label and non-label detection strategies used to relate structure and activity are discussed.