Public Thesis Defense of Maëlle BOTTIN - IMCN

Tuning the hydrogen-bonding pattern of aromatic oligoamides for selective recognition of anions by Maëlle BOTTIN

Vendredi 7 février 2025 à 16h00 - Auditoire BARB92, place Ste Barbe à 1348 Louvain-la-Neuve

Inorganic anions are involved in numerous important biological or environmental roles. As a result, the development of artificial systems capable to recognize these negatively charged species holds great promise for potential applications in anion sensing, removal or transport. However, achieving selective recognition of anions remains a current and significant challenge. 
Inspired by the sophisticated way nature can handle these anions, sometimes in a highly discriminative fashion, chemists have extensively focused at designing synthetic molecules capable of mimicking either folding or molecular recognition abilities of proteins. The use of scaffolds that can simultaneously exhibit both properties offers a promising strategy to achieve selective anion recognition, but this approach has been largely underexplored to date. In particular, Aromatic Oligoamide Foldamers (AOF) meet those criteria. This class of oligomeric strands fold into predictable helical secondary structures, generating an internal rigid and preorganized tubular cavity lined with potential hydrogen bond donors.
This doctoral research looks at further probing the use of aromatic oligoamide scaffolds as anion receptors, and to comprehensively study how modifications and fine-tuning of their cavities could influence the selectivity of the binding event.    

Membres du jury :

Prof. Michael Singleton (UCLouvain)(Promoteur)
Prof. Evelyne Van Ruymbeke  (UCLouvain) (Présidente)
Prof. Raphaël Robiette (UCLouvain) (Secrétaire)
Prof. Olivier Riant (UCLouvain) 
Prof. Hennie Valkenier (ULB)
Prof. Pedro Mateus (ITQB)

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