Automated synthesis platform for accelerated discovery of photoswitchable molecules

The project is dedicated to implement a key experimental component in our data driven approach to accelerate the development and optimization of molecular entities with focus on photoswitchable molecules. The automated synthesis platform consisting of three interconnected modules will be able to generate a large variety of individual species, i.e., compound libraries, but also mixtures thereof, i.e., dynamic libraries, using the Synthesis Module. The thus synthesized compounds will be separated and purified using the Separation Module before their analysis and characterization of key photophysical and photochemical properties will be carried out using the Analysis Module.

Establishing the automated synthesis platform will allow us to synthesize a large variety of molecular candidate structures and generate large amounts of reproducible high-quality characterization data focusing on their photochromic properties. The latter will be used in combination with machine learning to gain a deeper understanding of underlying structure-property relationships and allow for predictions of improved molecules thus accelerating the overall process of molecular material development.