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Although the automatic synthesis of molecules has been established, each reaction class uses bespoke hardware. This means that the connection of multi-step syntheses in a single machine to run many different protocols and reactions is not possible, as manual intervention is required. Here we show how the Chemputer synthesis robot can be programmed to perform many different reactions, including solid-phase peptide synthesis, iterative cross-coupling and accessing reactive, unstable diazirines in a single, unified system with high yields and purity. Developing universal and modular hardware that can be automated using one software system makes a wide variety of batch chemistry accessible. This is shown by our system, which performed around 8,500 operations while reusing only 22 distinct steps in 10 unique modules, with the code able to access 17 different reactions. We also demonstrate a complex convergent robotic synthesis of a peptide reacted with a diazirine-a process requiring 12 synthetic steps.

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.