Bioinspired organic chemistry

Abstract

This Annual Report reviews a selection of contributions from researchers in the field of organic chemistry broadly interpreted, which take inspiration from biomolecular systems. The report is divided in three sections: the first two sections discuss progress in organic chemistry inspired by nucleic acids and proteins. The third section, subtitled bio-molecular complexity inspired chemistry, combines the section that was devoted previously to lipid-inspired organic chemistry with systems chemistry. The re-arrangement of these two sections is based on the fact that most of the lipid-inspired chemistry reported deals with the study of the behaviour of multi-component chemical systems, i.e. species in solution and species attached to the membrane. In general terms, therefore, this section is devoted to organic chemistry inspired by the complexity of biomolecular systems. In addition to the lipid-membrane inspired organic chemistry, the last section reports advances in the study of self-sorting mixtures, dynamic combinatorial chemistry and chemistry inspired by pre-biotic systems. Although not necessarily explicit, the study of emergent properties of multi-component systems has become implicit in the development of many aspects of chemistry, including (or rather especially) bio-inspired organic chemistry.