Method and functional particles for carrying out chemical or biological reactions or syntheses

#The invention relates to a method and to functional particles for carrying out chemical or biological reactions or syntheses which particularly are used in the automated laboratory work in the field of combinatorial chemistry and molecular biotechnology.

#Functional spheres, beads, are already introduced as supports for chemical syntheses. Such particles (beads) are made, for example, of glass or polystyrene. Solid phase syntheses on beads are already introduced in the oligonucleotide chemistry and in the peptide chemistry as well as in the synthesis of organic molecules on a macroscopic scale. Hereby the solid phase support will be filled into columns or plates and will be flushed with a reagent, wetted and washed and the chemical synthesis will be induced in accordance with the synthesis protocol and the employed synthesis device, respectively.

#Also in the biochemical research solid phase supports (for example the so-called Dynabeads of the Dynal Company) are already introduced as supports for biochemical material. Thereby, the supporting material is coated, for example, with strept-avidin which permits to bind biotinized RNA or DNA-sequences to such supports via a strept-avidin biotin binding. Thus it is possible to carry out binding experiments in a selective manner by washing the beads with the target searched for.

#The object is realized by the features of the first and the fourth claim. In the following, the invention will be explained in more detail by virtue of schematical embodiments. There is shown in:

#FIG. 1 a part of the sequence according to the method for n synthesis reaction vessels and n functional particles, and

#FIG. 2 an exemplary special procedure of method for formation of a peptide library.

#In a first embodiment according to FIG. 1 there are provided in an exemplary fashion n synthesis reaction vessels (for example, columns) and n encoded charges of particles. The n particle charges differ from one another in that they exhibit densities p1 . . . n which differ from one another, whereby the density represents the code. In this way any desired substance classes≦n permits synthesizing as follows:

#In the example, each of the n reaction vessels shall be supplied with respective different chemical reaction solutions from the pool of modules to be combined (see FIG. 1). Then an equal number, if possible, of functional beads are provided in each column, whereby to each column functional beads of like density are allotted, whereby the densities of the functional beads which are added to the individual columns differ from each other.

#The first coupling step is carried out in allocating a given amount of functional particles of type 1 to the reaction vessel 1, of the type i to the reaction vessel i, up to the type n to the reaction vessel n. The synthesis coupling (different solvents, protocols etc.) is carried out. Then the functional beads are taken from the reaction vessels, the respective charges distributed according to the number of further reactions to be carried out, in the example to n equal parts, and combined (mixed) to yield new charges in such a manner that a mixture of particles of n different densities results per charge, that is, for example, in the i-th column there are proportional charges of all n coded particles and, hence, n different substances. Accordingly, in a next step of the synthesis there are generated in the column i all combinations from (1 . . . i . . . n)·i. This library can now be separated into its respective individual components via a sedimentation procedure or by centrifugation. Hereby, it is only important that the coordination to the respective step and to the respective column, respectively, is maintained: hence, ((1,i); . . . (i,i) . . . (n,i)) are filled each into vessels and the numbering and the coordination registered separately.