Research Projects

Enzyme activity is a topic of active discussion. Enzyme functionality is defined by the molecular organization within and around the active site in confined space. This project proposal attempts to unravel the balancing act between molecular assembly and second coordination sphere in biomimetic heterogeneous catalyst assembly-architectures. Judicious design and exploitation of the state-of-the-art biomimetic catalyst architectures derived from small molecules like, sugars, nucleic acids, peptides, and proteins are discussed under the above-mentioned framework. We aim to utilize inherent self-assembly nature of these small molecules in the presence of metal ions/ nanoparticles. Apart from the conventional ligand-metal interaction in the first coordination sphere of a catalyst, second coordination sphere plays key role in the catalytic activity of enzymes. Molecular building blocks can adopt distict spatial orientation surrounding the active catalytic centre with the help of noncovalent interactions. The orientation in the assembly-architecture can be tuned using different types of molecular units, metal ions, stoichiometry, counter ions, pH, and other controlling parameters. Controlled implementation of these interactions appears to be very difficult and tricky, and resulting catalysts will definitely show various activities depending on the experimental conditions. Moreover, advanced strategies like catalyst gel-architecture, microprinting, computational model development will also be anticipated to the advancement of catalyst architectures to achieve utmost efficiency, selectivity, and sustainability. In conclusion, we believe the project proposal will unravel the role of molecular architectonics and SCS in designing efficient catalyst assembly-architecture and will inspire researchers in academia and across the chemical and pharmaceutical industries and offers enormous possibilities for its future endeavor developments in the field of catalysis.