This issue of Combinatorial Chemistry concerns a new research area in combinatorial chemistry: materials science. Materials chemists have had success in applying the methods of high throughput sample preparation and screening, developed principally for pharmaceuticals research, to the discovery of new solid state and polymeric materials. We invited several researchers whose reports had appeared in the last few years to review their own work and to describe in general terms how "combinatorial methods" can be used in materials chemistry. With examples from dielectrics, phosphors, catalysts, and polymers, we constructed an issue that charts newly explored territory.
This concise volume certainly misses important areas; our goal was not to review all that has been explored but to provide clear descriptions of a few successful investigations. There are five papers: X.-D. Xiang of Lawrence Berkeley Lab gives a high level view of the preparation and analysis of integrated materials chips, each of which contains a library of inorganic compounds, prepared in place on wafer-like substrates. Ted Sun, now at General Electric, reports with greater detail the use of masking techniques in preparation of integrated materials chips for identification of new solid state phosphors. R. B. van Dover and coauthors at Lucent Technologies describe their use of a continuous composition spread method to prepare and screen libraries of dielectric materials. At first glance the LBL and Lucent methods seem alike, but closer inspection makes clear their distinct and inventive differences. John Newsam of Molecular Simulations Inc. (Pharmacopeia) and F. SchΓΌth of the Max Planck Institute at MΓΌlheim have reviewed the application of combinatorial methods to development of catalysts, emphasizing the challenges in using these in heterogeneous catalysis. The paper that is most unlike the others is from George R. Newkome's group at the University of South Florida. Their preparation and characterization of "peripherally heterogeneous dendrimers" is classical combinatorial chemistry: compounds react with combinations of reagents in conventional organic reactions and are analyzed with standard laboratory equipment. The process yields extraordinary new polymers with functionally diverse surfaces that may find commercial application sooner than any other of the combinatorially discovered materials.
An important message recurs in these papers: the