AI for organic and polymer synthesis

Recent years have witnessed the transformative impact from the integration of artificial intelligence with organic and polymer synthesis. This synergy offers innovative and intelligent solutions to a range of classic problems in synthetic chemistry. These exciting advancements include the prediction of molecular property, multi-step retrosynthetic pathway planning, elucidation of the structure-performance relationship of single-step transformation, establishment of the quantitative linkage between polymer structures and their functions, design and optimization of polymerization process, prediction of the structure and sequence of biological macromolecules, as well as automated and intelligent synthesis platforms. Chemists can now explore synthetic chemistry with unprecedented precision and efficiency, creating novel reactions, catalysts, and polymer materials under the datadriven paradigm. Despite these thrilling developments, the field of artificial intelligence(AI) synthetic chemistry is still in its infancy, facing challenges and limitations in terms of data openness, model interpretability, as well as software and hardware support. This review aims to provide an overview of the current progress, key challenges, and future development suggestions in the interdisciplinary field between AI and synthetic chemistry. It is hoped that this overview will offer readers a comprehensive understanding of this emerging field, inspiring and promoting further scientific research and development.

Synthetic Automations:A Revolution from"Stone Age"to Modern Era

Traditional synthesis made outstanding achievements but still suffers various drawbacks,such as manual operation,poor efficiency,and lack of reproducibility.Thanks to the development of laboratory automation,synthetic chemistry is now chasing a pavement from a labor-intensive process to intelligent automation.Herein,we highlight some of the most recent representative breakthroughs in automated synthesis and present an outlook for this field.We hope this Topic can arouse chemists'interest in automated synthe-sis and drive synthetic automation to a better intelligent and automatic way.

Auto Machine Learning Assisted Preparation of Carboxylic Acid by TEMPO-Catalyzed Primary Alcohol Oxidation

Though alcohol oxidations were considered as well-established reactions,selecting productive conditions or predicting reaction yields for unseen alcohols remained as major challenges.Herein,an auto machine learning(ML)model for TEMPO-catalyzed oxida-tion of primary alcohols to the corresponding carboxylic acids is disclosed.A dataset of 3444 data,consisting of 282 primary alco-hols and 45 conditions,were generated using high-throughput experimentation(HTE).With the HTE data and 105 descriptors,a multi-label prediction was performed with AutoGluon(an open-source auto machine learning framework)and KNIME(an open-source data analytics platform).For the independent test of 240 reactions(a full matrix of 20 unseen alcohols and 12 condi-tions),AutoGluon with multi-label prediction for yield prediction(AGMP)gave excellent performance.For external test of 1308 re-actions(consisting of 84 alcohols and 45 conditions),AGMP still afforded good results with R2 as 0.767 and MAE as 4.9%.The model also revealed that the newly generated descriptor(Y/N,classification of the reaction reactivity)was the most relevant descriptor for yield prediction,offering a new perspective to integrate HTE and ML in organic synthesis.