MolFActory · Towards a ‘molecular factory’: Processive sequence-selective synthesis with a synthetic molecular machine

The aim of this project is to construct a synthetic molecular machine that is capable of performing a complex task, chemical synthesis, far beyond the current state-of-the-art. Our target is to mimic translation, the process through which protein is synthesized on the mRNA template by the ribosome. Although biology uses threaded molecular architectures to transfer chemical information during sequence-specific oligomer and polymer assembly, such processes are yet to be reproduced in artificial small-molecule systems. The successful realization of the project will mark a major breakthrough in the development of artificial molecular machines that can perform real tasks at the molecular level including, ultimately, the synthesis of unnatural sequence specific oligomers and polymers that are not accessible by other routes.