Speaker：Professor Colin Bonduelle, University of Bordeaux, France

Time：Thursday, July 17, 2025   10:00 a.m. - 11:30 a.m.

Venue：Room 324, Building No.2, Science and Technology Park, Wushan Campus

Abstract

Proteins are natural building blocks that possess many features still unrivaled by their synthetic counterparts, including chemical diversity, hierarchical structures, specific chemical modifications, and programmed system dynamics. Combined with their potential for metabolism in living systems (biodegradation, etc.), these properties make proteins highly attractive for designing the polymers of tomorrow. While significant advances have been achieved in genetic engineering, a major remaining challenge is optimizing large scale protein production (extraction, recombinant protein, etc.). Interestingly, the most economical and efficient approach to polypeptides is a chemical approach: the ring-opening polymerization (ROP) of amino acid N-carboxyanhydride (NCA) monomers.  

Compared to proteins, peptidic polymers are much simpler macromolecules in which amino acids are statistically arranged. However, these polypeptides combine advantageous features of synthetic polymers (solubility, processability, rubber elasticity, etc.) with those of natural proteins (secondary structure, functionality, biocompatibility, etc.). Recent progress in this field has been impressive, and this talk will illustrate:

1. How the secondary structure and the macromolecular engineering of polypeptide guide the design of advanced materials;

2. How aqueous ROP of NCA monomers can be extended to a PISA process;

3. How polymerization of NCAs can afford simplified analogues of natural proteins.

Biography

Colin Bonduelle is a research director at CNRS (HDR 2018) and leads research at LCPO, Université de Bordeaux, focusing on bioinspired polymers at the interface of biology and medicine. He completed his PhD in molecular chemistry at the University of Toulouse with Didier Bourissou and was a postdoctoral fellow under the supervision of E. Gillies at Western University in Canada, where he worked on amphiphilic copolymers. He is now an expert in ring-opening polymerization and currently works on the synthesis, characterization, and application of protein-like polymers.

His in-depth expertise in N-carboxyanhydride chemistry, along with the new tools he has recently developed in Polymerization-Induced Self-Assembly (PISA), provide excellent platforms for designing polymers for tomorrow’s applications. This work has recently included ring-expansion methodologies to mimic antimicrobial peptides (in collaboration with B. Dupuy at Institut Pasteur) and aqueous ring-opening polymerization processes (water-assisted or ROPISA). He is co-author of more than 60 articles and 9 patents. He was selected for the CNRS 'Cadre à Haut Potentiel' (CHP) class of 2022 and is currently supervising a team of nine PhD students.