Abstract

Transmembrane photoelectron transfer: surprises for artificial photosynthesis
Natural photosynthesis makes use of lipid membranes for organizing the small molecules and proteins in charge of unidirectional photoelectron transfer, thereby limiting charge recombination. In a biomimetic approach, supramolecular chemists design molecules specifically to span through lipid membranes, or functionalize membranes with amphiphilic catalysts and photosensitizers, to perform photocatalytic transmembrane electron transfer. When doing so, they usually assume molecules will behave following their wish. In this talk, I will show a few of the surprises we had en-route to the development of photocatalytic lipid bilayers. Not only do so-called “transmembrane” molecules not always assemble perpendicular to the lipid bilayer, but also, amphiphilic molecules aimed at performing photocatalysis in a membrane, are not always that amphiphilic, which generates many surprises in the actual photocatalytic and photoelectron transfer results. Our results show that new knowledge is needed in supramolecular photocatalysis before the biomimetic approach can solve the energy crisis and provide the solar fuels of the future.

Biography

Sylvestre Bonnet is Full Professor in Bioinorganic Chemistry at Leiden University. He obtained his PhD in 2005 at the University of Strasbourg, France, in the group of Nobel Laureate Jean-Pierre Sauvage. He then moved to The Netherlands as a postdoc, where he successively worked in the groups of Gerard van Koten (Utrecht), Jan Reedijk (Leiden), and Antoinette Killian and Bert Klein Gebbink (Utrecht). Between 2009 and 2014 he completed a Tenure Track position in Inorganic Chemistry at Leiden University, where he was tenured in 2015 and became full professor in 2020. He obtained several prestigious grants, including a Starting Grant from the European Research Council (2013), and three young investigator grants (VENI 2008, VIDI 2012, VICI 2019) from the Dutch Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). Since 2015 he is Fellow of the Young Academy of Europe, and in 2017-2019 he was YAE Board Member. His expertise lies at the crossing point between bioinorganic chemistry, photochemistry, and lipid membranes. His current research interests are supramolecular photocatalysis, anticancer photoactivated chemotherapy, and upconversion.