IUPAC

Combinatorial Chemistry involving the rapid synthetic assembly of structural building blocks in various possible combinations to produce large libraries of compounds for drug screening purposes is a rapidly expanding field of Medicinal Chemistry. Since these combinatorial libraries can number in the millions of compounds nomenclature issues arise as to how the compounds within such libraries should be designated. The objective of the Working Party is to arrive at a set of recommended nomenclature guidelines for this purpose.

Efforts have been directed into two areas.

Firstly to identify new terminology and usages which have entered the literature of combinatorial chemistry, and to define and/or clarify their meaning. This will result in a glossary for Combinatorial Chemistry which should appear in 1999.

Technical Report published published in Pure Appl. Chem., 71(12), 2349-2365 (1999), entitled 'Glossary of terms used in combinatorial chemistry'.

Also, it is hoped to arrange the appearance of this publication in a key journal in this specialty.

Secondly, an effort is underway to provide systematic methods for the reporting and recording of structures in combinatorial libraries. It is hoped that this will result in a set of standards for publication of combinatorial methods which will facilitate indexing and automated retrieval of work in this field. Recommendations for this portion of our work are expected in Q41999/Q12000.