Por Cecília Roque (Department of Chemistry and UCIBIO, NOVA School of Science and Technology, Lisbon, Portugal).

Molecular recognition is ubiquitous in Nature. In my group, we take inspiration from dynamic molecular recognition events in Nature to engineer biological and chemical tools that give rise to advanced functional materials. We explore such materials in bioseparation and biosensing.

A first topic of the talk will address ligand design in bioseparation. Rationally designed chemical combinatorial libraries support the development of robust peptidomimetics that can be easily adapted to several targets and to chromatographic and non-chromatographic matrices.

The second topic of the talk will focus on the field of artificial olfaction, namely on self-assembled materials that act as molecular recognition systems for analytes in the gas phase. Together with in-house developed electronic noses and machine learning algorithms, such materials are tuned to mimic the sense of smell.