Symyx got its start in 1994, the brainchild of Peter Schultz, a chemist who several years earlier at the University of California, Berkeley hit on the idea of applying the techniques of rapid drug-screening to materials science.

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The method offers the promise of a rapid and precise screening of algae directly rather than the existing time-consuming, cumbersome and error-prone means for analyzing algae, and may prove pivotal in the development of a fuel industry based on algae.

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One reason for this is the lack of a rapid, sensitive, inexpensive screening method.

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Instead of making drugs, they would use the high-tech tools of gene chips, high-throughput screening, combinatorial chemistry (the rapid mixing and matching of chemicals) and bioinformatics (software that analyzes data)--to develop entirely different compounds.

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