Our main interest lies in supramolecular chemistry. We’re trying to understand how and why molecules interact with each other, and what are the rules that govern self-assembly in nature. That being said, we never run away from a challenging synthesis or a seemingly indecipherable spectrum. We believe that by answering these questions we will be able to produce organic materials with new properties that will ultimately lead to applications that will change everyday life.

We use on a regular basis microwave assisted synthesis, HPLC, 1D and 2D NMR techniques, mass spectrometry, isothermal calorimetry, UV-vis and CD spectroscopies. 

We are part of the

Organic Materials

We’re investigating the properties of naphthalenediimides in conjunction with poly substituted aromatic groups for electro-optical applications. This work is conducted in collaboration with Prof. Gunther Hennrich of Universidad Autonoma de Madrid.

We’re working in collaboration with Prof. Alain Nogaret from the Physics department of our university towards the development of flexible electronic materials, based on supramolecular functionalisation of graphitic substrates with polyaromatic derivatives.

In collaboration with Dr Adelina Ilie from the Physics department we’re working on creating hybrid organic-inorganic 2D materials, while vith Prof. Valev from the same department we work on chiral molecules and new ways of detecting chirality.

Dynamic Combinatorial Chemistry

In this project we’re letting Nature select the structure / topology or the best receptor / ligand from a pool of potentially active molecules using reversible covalent chemistry. We’re using mainly disulfide, imine and hydrazone exchange. One of the most exciting things we’ve discovered is that structural divergence on racemic mixtures can happen spontaneously in aqueous systems under disulfide exchange conditions. This implies that supramolecular interactions could have been involved in the chiral propagation that led to the biological world’s homochirality.

Here are a few of our topologically complex targets (the images were generated with KnotPlot). A few have already been made by others and us but the majority are elusive. What a challenge! They are very beautiful and one of our structures has been highlighted on Beautiful Chemistry.net.

Ligands for DNAs

We’re studying ligands for various types of biologically relevant DNA structures, such as G-quadruplexes or double strand DNA sequences. We use molecular modeling, synthesis and analytical tools to study these interactions.