New environmental, economic and sociological constraints are prompting our societies to revolutionize their production methods and technologies. Against a backdrop of strong growth in the world's population, environmental degradation (air, water, etc.) and depletion of traditional resources (fossil fuels, metals), the need to use more and more renewable resources (sun, biomass, etc.), both for our energy consumption (electricity, fuels, etc.) and for the production of a variety of materials, is becoming increasingly urgent.in this context, for chemistry, which has the ambition to become "green", these new developments involve in particular the research and exploitation of new catalysts.
One of the most attractive approaches to developing these "green" catalysts is to gain a better understanding of nature and to draw inspiration from it to "invent", by combining biology and chemistry, original processes and systems that meet these new criteria. Indeed, over the course of a very long evolutionary history, the living world - animal, plant and microbial - has developed clean, economical and efficient strategies for building complex, organized systems from the simple building blocks of our environment (sun, water,CO2, O2, etc.), and for constantly adapting them to fluctuations in that environment. To do this, it relies on biocatalysts, essentially enzymes and metallo-enzymes, which are endowed with exceptional properties, in terms of selectivity and efficiency, and which represent fascinating sources of inspiration. The lectures and seminars will describe the concepts, methods and recent results of "biomimetic and bio-inspired catalysis", leading to chemical catalysts that reproduce certain structural and functional properties of biocatalysts, and "artificial enzymes", hybrid catalysts that combine biological components (proteins) with synthetic chemical components.