Ligand Libraries for the Extraction of Metal Ions: Dynamic Combinatorial and High-Throughput Screening Methods

Combinatorial methods have been applied with a measure of success in the field of metal ion coordination chemistry (1 –5 ). High-throughput screening methods have been used to facilitate the discovery of new catalysts and to design ligands for binding metal ions (6 –9 ). Metal ion coordination complexes have been central to the development of dynamic combinatorial methods as well. Dynamic combinatorial methods utilize a library whose composition is con-trolled through reversible interactions with a target molecule (10 ,11 ). Metalligand bonds are often labile enough to undergo reversible bond formation under mild conditions, making metal ions ideal components for dynamic librar-ies. Such metal ion complexes are used in dynamic combinatorial libraries for the purpose of designing compounds with unusual shapes or recognition properties (12 ,13 ).