Scientists claim that a new system of automatically turning words into molecules on demand will open up the digitisation of chemistry.
The new system has been developed by researchers who work at the University of Glasgow’s School of Chemistry. Their claim is that the system will lead to the creating of a Spotify for chemistry. Meaning recipes for important molecules including drugs will be available online for download.
Such an incredible system is expected to make it easier for countries to easily access medications, enable more efficient international scientific collaboration, and even support the human exploration of space.
The team working at Glasgow was led by Professor Lee Cronin and under his supervision, the groundwork for digital chemistry has been laid and being called a chemical processing unit by them. It is basically an affordable desktop-sized robot chemist that is capable of doing the repetitive and time-consuming work of creating chemicals. Other robot chemists, built with different operating systems, have also been developed elsewhere.
The approach taken by the researchers at Univerisity of Glasgow has been described in a paper published in the journal Science. The paper describes how the team used their system to scan scientific papers and produce 12 different molecules using their chemical processing unit, including the analgesic lidocaine, the Dess-Martin periodinane oxidation reagent, and the fluorinating agent AlkylFluor.
Professor Lee Cronin, Regius Professor of Chemistry at the University of Glasgow, said: “What we’ve managed to do with the development of our ‘Chemical Spotify’ is something similar to ripping a compact disc into an MP3. We take information stored in a physical format, in this case, a scientific paper, and pull out all the data we need to create a digital file which can be played on any system, in this case, any robot chemist, including our robotic system which is an order of magnitude lower cost than any other similar robot.
“We’re hoping that the system we’ve built will massively expand the capabilities of robot chemists and allow the creation of a huge database of molecules drawn from hundreds of years’ worth of scientific papers.
“Our system, which we’re calling Chemify, can read and run XDL files which have been shared among users. Putting that kind of knowledge directly in the hands of people with access to robot chemists could help doctors make drugs on-demand in the future. It could even mean that future manned missions to Mars could take raw chemical materials with them and make whatever they need right there on the red planet.”