Fluorescence techniques have been used widely in chemistry and biology for over a century.1 With the advent of combinatorial solid phase synthesis, a variety of fluorescence techniques for resin beads have been developed and adopted for broad applications, which include encoding/decoding, 2 fluorescent molecule binding assays, 3 and catalytic activity detection. 4 The split-and-pool method, another important technique in combinatorial chemistry, facilitates the synthesis of millions of molecules in a one-bead-one-compound library format; in principle, each single bead of resin acts as a separate microreactor. Although conventional screenings of these split-and-pool libraries have usually been performed as mixtures, a segregation approach of each single resin has been demonstrated recently, avoiding complicated data analysis. 5 To simplify the handling of a single resin, the researchers necessarily utilized a super size bead (a 500 µm diameter Rapp PS (polystyrene) bead, about 5-fold larger in diameter than an ordinary synthetic resin) with the aid of bead arraying tools.The problem with the kinetics of solid phase reactions is that it demands, in many cases, if not all, tedious sample preparation steps including filtering, washing and transferring. While single resin bead FT-IR spectra have been utilized successfully to quantify solid phase reaction rates, 6 no comparable fluorescence kinetics has yet been demonstrated. Herein we report the first example of single resin bead kinetics using continuous measurement of fluorescence generation on an activated ester resin.Activated esters on solid support have been developed as convenient labeling reagents, especially for amine nucleophiles.7-9 Most of the reported functionalities, such as nitrophenol, N-hydroxysuccinimide, HOBt (1-hydroxybenzotriazole) and Kaiser oxime, have been attached to a polystyrene solid support by a Friedel-Craft reaction 10 or to a thiol resin by a maleimide linker, 9 limiting the selection of resin compositions. To overcome this limitation, we utilized the well-established amide bond formation to couple tetrafluoro-4-hydroxy benzoic acid with an aminomethyl resin (1), which has a broad material selection, creating a novel tetrafluorophenol resin (2).11 For kinetic studies under various conditions, an environment-insensitive high quantum yield fluorescence molecule, 4-acetamino-1,8-naphthalimide (3), 7 was chosen to prepare the activated ester resin (A).
11When reacted with a small amount of benzylamine (B) in various solvents, resin A gave a pure product (C) without work-up or purification, and the amount of generated product could be quantified by fluorescence measurement. Similarly obtained fluorescence data was previously used to calculate the second order reaction rate constant of nitrophenol resin, after removal of the resin by filtration followed by a sample dilution.
7One important observation was that the fluorescence was quenched almost completely in the resin-bound molecule, while the released product C showed a bright fluoresce...