A new machine vision method is presented to detect micro tubes with colored solutions or undissolved compounds in solvents on screening plates used in drug discovery. The method presented herein takes an image of a 96 tubes micro tube rack as input. After applying edge detection on the input image, the circles that characterize the borders of the micro tubes are detected via shape matching. A gradient search is used to extract the colors from the micro tubes. Automatic calibration is applied to adapt to changing light conditions. Experiments with more than two thousand micro tube racks (approx. 170,000 compounds) compiled over three years showed that the method is fast and robust.

A synthesis and stereochemistry confirmation of a constituent recently isolated from the whole plant Isodon excisus is reported. An enantioselective catalytic boron-mediated reduction of an α-bromoketone was utilized in the key synthetic transformation. The methodology described herein was also used for the synthesis of the natural product's enantiomer and several derivatives. In addition, the compounds were evaluated for inhibitory activity in a caspase induction assay. The natural product was found to be devoid of activity, but several derivatives had moderate inhibitory activity (EC50<1 μM).