The diversity of chemical synthesis and the power of genetics are linked to provide a powerful, versatile method for drug screening. A process of alternating parallel combinatorial synthesis is used to encode individual members of a large library of chemicals with unique nucleotide sequences. After the chemical entity is bound to a target, the genetic tag can be amplified by replication and utilized for enrichment of the bound molecules by serial hybridization to a subset of the library. The nature of the chemical structure bound to the receptor is decoded by sequencing the nucleotide tag.