ERC Starting Grant for Dr Otto
The European Research Council (ERC) has awarded a Starting Grant to Dr Sijbren Otto of the Stratingh Institute for Chemistry. The ERC Starting Grant is a prestigious personal grant supporting researchers in setting up a research team or programme. Otto will receive EUR 1.5 million over five years. His research, ‘Self Replication in Dynamic Molecular Networks’, is in the field of systems chemistry and combines organic chemistry with molecular self-assemblage and self-replication.
New concepts in self-replication
The research will concentrate on new concepts in self-replication based on the mechanical fragmentation of larger assembled structures to create smaller structures.
The resulting smaller structures will be able to grow faster than the larger structures.
This process is expected to lead to exponential growth, whereby the product itself will function as a catalyst for the creation of more of the same product (known as self-replication).
This is a new way to create macrocycles.
The research has potential applications in the field of molecular sensors, smart materials and systems chemistry.
| Last modified: | 22 August 2024 1.35 p.m. |
More news
-
16 September 2025
The ocean absorbs carbon from the air, but what if the temperature increases?
‘Fortunately, seawater absorbs carbon dioxide (CO₂). If it didn’t, things would have been over and done with already,’ according to climate and ocean researchers Richard Bintanja and Rob Middag. But what actually happens to the ocean's carbon...
-
10 September 2025
Funding for Feringa and Minnaard from National Growth Fund project Big Chemistry
Two UG research projects have received funding from the National Growth Fund project Big Chemistry via NWO.
-
09 September 2025
Carbon dioxide’s fingerprint
In the year 2000, Harro Meijer, Professor of Isotope Physics at the University of Groningen, set up the Lutjewad Measurement Station near Hornhuizen. There, researchers from Groningen are mapping where CO2 in the atmosphere originates and where it...