But now A is actually a mixture of five components while B may be a composite of 10. Others see in this the genesis of a new revolution in the search for superconductors or other space-age materials. Whether heresy or panacea, combinatorial chemistry is here to stay. Once the similarities between natural product extraction and deliberate mixture production were recognized, the dogma that chemical entities should be synthesized, purified and analyzed one at a time began to erode. The result is a somewhat tumultuous, totally controversial, but infinitely exciting and challenging new future for the chemical sciences.
Combinatorial chemistry has many parallels in nature.
Our immune system is able to produce hundreds of millions of different antibodies by recombining segments of a variable region of primary structure. Even deadly South Pacific cone snails appear to have been making mixtures for the past 50 million years or so. Baldomero Olivera of Utah has found that these creatures have the ability to harpoon and paralyze their prey using highly effective peptide toxins. The active ingredients are actually mixtures of 100 or more deadly venoms, essentially produced by the combinatorial scrambling of amino acids. And it is with amino acids that modern combinatorial chemistry began.