Ligand libraries for high throughput screening of homogeneous catalysts

To accelerate the discovery of new or improved homogeneous catalysts, research groups in industry and academia have embraced high throughput experimentation (HTE). Such methodologies consist of preparing and testing large numbers of catalysts in parallel. Homogeneous metal catalysts are very well-suited for HTE, since in many cases, they can be prepared by simply mixing a metal precursor and a ligand. However, an HTE program requires a large set of chemically diverse ligands, i.e. a ligand library. In this review, we describe five different approaches for assembling ligand libraries based on an extensive survey of the literature. These approaches are based on commercial ligands, modular ligands, mixtures of ligands, supramolecular ligands or ligands prepared via the tools of biochemistry.