The
explosion in
the use of machine learning for automated chemical
reaction optimization is gathering pace. However, the lack of a standard
architecture that connects the concept of chemical transformations
universally to software and hardware provides a barrier to using the
results of these optimizations and could cause the loss of relevant
data and prevent reactions from being reproducible or unexpected findings
verifiable or explainable. In this Perspective, we describe how the
development of the field of digital chemistry or chemputation, that
is the universal code-enabled control of chemical reactions using
a standard language and ontology, will remove these barriers allowing
users to focus on the chemistry and plug in algorithms according to
the problem space to be explored or unit function to be optimized.
We describe a standard hardware (the chemical processing programming
architecture—the ChemPU) to encompass all chemical synthesis,
an approach which unifies all chemistry automation strategies, from
solid-phase peptide synthesis, to HTE flow chemistry platforms, while
at the same time establishing a publication standard so that researchers
can exchange chemical code (χDL) to ensure reproducibility and
interoperability. Not only can a vast range of different chemistries
be plugged into the hardware, but the ever-expanding developments
in software and algorithms can also be accommodated. These technologies,
when combined will allow chemistry, or chemputation, to follow computation—that
is the running of code across many different types of capable hardware
to get the same result every time with a low error rate.