Final Report Summary - CHEMBIOMECH (Exploring mechanism in chemical biology by high-throughput approaches)
This proposal has employed libraries of molecules to give such mechanistic insight – into how enzyme catalysis is brought about in proteins and polymeric enzyme models and into the molecular recognition and cell biology of drug delivery reagents. The basis of such insight was possible based on our development of an extremely miniaturised system to 'look' at each member of a molecular library: we employed pico- to nanolitre droplets as equivalents of the proverbial test tube. Such nanodroplets can be made and analysed in microfluidic devices at high frequency (more than a million per hour!) - the enormous amount of information we can gather from insight into the properties of such large examples helps us to navigate diversity space more efficiently than currently possible. At the same time the small droplet size makes this system extremely economical (using approximately a millionfold less reagent) and is relatively easily established in non-specialist settings.