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Content archived on 2024-05-28

NON-EQuilibrium Self-Assembly

Objective

"Living systems operate in a far-from-equilibrium state: they need to eat, drink, and breathe to power the continuous chemical processes occurring in each of their cells, in order to stay alive. When the supply of food or nutrients is stopped the living systems relax to their thermodynamic equilibrium state, that is, death. So far, scientists (and chemists in particular) have managed to make synthetic analogs of many of the intricate structures found in nature, using the tools of organic and supramolecular chemistry. These synthetic structures, impressive as they are, mostly reside either in their thermodynamic equilibrium, or in kinetically trapped states. In sharp contrast with nature, however, we are not yet able to keep chemical structure in a far-from-equilibrium state reliably and controllably. In this proposal we attempt to overcome the latter inability by pushing biological and synthetic supramolecular assemblies out of their thermodynamic equilibrium using a chemical fuel or using thermal/magnetic field gradients, respectively. We believe that the resulting dissipative nonequilibrium self-assemblies (NON-EQ-SA) envisioned by Prigogine (Nobel laureate 1977) can be controlled to a higher extent than currently possible in equilibrium. Our method to control the structure of supramolecular assemblies would be of great importance to materials science and medicine, where well-defined entities lead to improved materials performance and pharmacological efficacy, respectively."

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Topic(s)

Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.

Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

FP7-PEOPLE-2013-CIG
See other projects for this call

Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MC-CIG - Support for training and career development of researcher (CIG)

Coordinator

UNIVERSITE DE STRASBOURG
EU contribution
€ 100 000,00
Address
RUE BLAISE PASCAL 4
67081 STRASBOURG
France

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Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

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