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In this review, applications of silicon carbide-based microtiter platforms designed for use in combination with dedicated multimode microwave reactors are described. These platforms are employed not only for the efficient parallel synthesis of compound libraries, but also in the context of high-throughput reaction screening/optimization and a number of other (bio)analytical and biomedical applications. Since the semiconducting plate material (silicon carbide) is strongly microwave absorbing and possesses high thermal conductivity, no temperature gradients across the microtiter plate exist. Therefore, many of the disadvantages experienced in attempting to perform microtiter plate chemistry under conventional microwave conditions can be eliminated. In general, the silicon carbide-based microtiter platforms allow sealed vessel processing (either directly in the well or in glass vials placed into the wells) of volumes ranging from 0.02-3.0 mL at a maximum temperature/pressure limit of 200°C/20 bar. Depending on the specific plate and rotor configuration, a maximum of 80-192 transformations can be carried out in parallel in a single microwave irradiation experiment under strict temperature control. A platform type utilizing HPLC/GC vials as reaction vessels allows analysis directly from the reaction vessel eliminating the need for a transfer step from the reaction to the analysis vial. The latter system is particularly useful for analytical applications as well as reaction optimization/screening.

In this review, published applications of microwave-assisted derivatization procedures for gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) are summarized. Among the broad range of analytical techniques available, GC/MS is still the method of choice for most high-throughput screening procedures in forensic/clinical toxicology, doping control and food and environmental analysis. Despite the many advantages of the GC/MS method, time-consuming derivatization steps are often required in order to obtain desirable chromatographic characteristics or to improve the stability and detectability of the target analytes. These derivatization processes typically require reaction times from 30 min up to several hours at elevated temperature. In contrast, microwave protocols have demonstrated to be able to reduce the time required for derivatization to a few minutes, and can thus very effectively shorten the overall analysis time, in particular when carried out in a high-throughput format. Herein, the literature in this field is summarized and recent experimental techniques for performing parallel GC/MS derivatization protocols are discussed.

The heating behavior of silicon carbide reaction platforms under 2.45 GHz microwave irradiation was investigated with the aid of online thermoimaging cameras and multiple-channel fiber-optic probe temperature sensors placed inside the wells/vials of the silicon carbide microtiter plates. Microwave irradiation leads to a rapid and homogeneous heating of the entire plate, with minimal deviations in the temperature recorded at different positions of the plate or inside the wells. In temperature-controlled experiments using dedicated multimode reactors, solvents with different microwave absorption characteristics can be heated in parallel in individual wells/vials of the silicon carbide plate reaching the same set temperature. Due to the large heat capacity and high thermal conductivity of silicon carbide, the plates are able to moderate any field inhomogeneities inside a microwave cavity. Although the heating of the plates can be performed extremely efficiently inside a microwave reactor, heating and synthetic applications can alternatively be carried out by applying conventional conductive heating of the silicon carbide plates on a standard hotplate. Due to the slower heating of the silicon carbide material under these conditions, somewhat longer reaction times will be required.

Direct and rapid heating by microwave irradiation in combination with sealed vessel processing in many cases enables reactions to be carried out in a fraction of the time generally required using conventional conditions. This makes microwave chemistry an ideal tool for rapid reaction scouting and optimization of conditions, allowing very rapid progress through hypotheses-experiment-results iterations. The speed at which multiple variations of reaction conditions can be performed allows a morning discussion of "What should we try?" to become an after-lunch discussion of "What were the results?" Not surprisingly, therefore, many scientists both in academia and industry have turned to microwave synthesis as a front-line methodology for their projects. In this review, more than 220 published examples of microwave-assisted synthetic organic transformations from the 2004 to 2008 literature are discussed. An additional ca. 500 reaction schemes are presented in the Electronic Supplementary Material, providing the reader with an overall number of ca. 930 references in this fast-moving and exciting field.

Different scavenging techniques using polymer-supported sequestration agents are described for the purification steps in the synthesis of N3-acylated dihydropyrimidines. For scavenging both excess anhydride and unwanted byproducts, polystyrene and silica supported diamines, aminomethyl-functionalized SynPhase Lanterns and diethylenetriamine StratoSpheres Plugs are used. In both synthesis and purification microwave flash heating was utilized, reducing reaction times from hours to minutes. These two steps coupled with an efficient solid-phase extraction (SPE) workup allowed the generation of a 28-member library of N3-acylated dihydropyrimidines using anhydrides. Using related protocols a 15-member library of N3-functionalized dihydropyrimidines utilizing acid chlorides as acylating reagents was also obtained.

The 2(1H)-pyrazinones have been demonstrated to be versatile building blocks for the synthesis of biologically active compounds. Here, an efficient method is described for the decoration of these interesting scaffolds. Microwave-assisted palladium catalyzed reactions allow the easy introduction of different substituents at the C3- and even at the rather unreactive C5-position of the pyrazinones. Stille, Suzuki, Heck, Sonogashira reactions, in addition to reductive dechlorinations, and cyanation reactions are investigated.

A high yield multicomponent reaction providing multifunctionalized pyrido[2,3-d]pyrimidines with up to four diversity centers in a one-pot microwave-assisted cyclocondensation of alpha,beta-unsaturated esters, amidine systems and malononitrile (or ethyl cyanoacetate) is described.