Introduction

Combinatorial chemistry, in general, means a route to discover promising compounds and self-assemblies that is better, cheaper and faster than other existing methods. Dynamics combinatorial chemistry (DCC) is considered to be an evolutionary approach for bottom-up nanotechnology. For development of a DCC scheme it is necessary to put together a dynamic combinatorial library (DCL) of intermediate components, which upon addition of templates, will produce the expected molecular assembly. In the formation of DCC the concept of molecular recognition becomes important. A complementary approach to DCC is the science of host-guest chemistry. In this chapter we introduce the principles of DCC along with DCL, molecular recognition and hostguest chemistry.

The science of combinatorial chemistry refers to using a combinatorial process of experiments to generate sets of molecular assemblies (compounds) from connections between sets of building blocks. It also refers to the high-throughput synthesis and screening of chemical substances to produce and identify new agents with useful properties.

A combinatorial chemistry includes, first, the synthesis of chemical compounds as ensembles (libraries) and, then, the screening of those libraries to search for compounds with certain desirable properties. Presently combinatorial chemistry is exploited as a basic research tool to determine the function of enzymes and to identify new enzyme inhibitors. Combinatorial chemistry is considered as a potentially speedy route to new self-assemblies in nanotechnology as well as discovery of new drugs,...