A Tool for Reaction Monitoring in Real Time, the Development of a “Walk-Up Automated Reaction Profiling” System

Optimization of chemical reactions requires a thorough analysis of reaction products and intermediates over a given time course. Chemical reactions are often analyzed by liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry (LC-MS), but generating LC-MS samples and data analysis is time-consuming and produces a significant amount of waste. We sought to remove the sample preparation and data analysis steps by implementing an iChemExplorer/Agilent LC-MS instrument as our reactor and analysis tool, coupled with an automated report generator of reaction progress over time. Herein, we show that our easy-to-use walk-up automated reaction profiling (WARP) system can sample chemical reactions multiple times to produce a data-rich report of reaction progress over time.