Date: Thursday, 11th June at 12:00
Venue: Seminari A, IQAC-CSIC
Invited speaker: Dr. Shigeru Deguchi, Research Center for Bioscience and Nanoscience, JAMSTEC.
Title: Deep-Sea-Inspired Chemistry: There’s Plenty of Room for Chemistry at the Bottom
Abstract:
The deep sea represents an extreme environment that differs markedly from the Earth’s surface in terms of pressure, temperature, and light. Deep-sea-inspired chemistry is an emerging framework that extracts design principles from deep-sea natural history and translates them into new paradigms in materials science and process engineering, thereby promoting a transition in ocean utilization from a resource-based to a knowledge-based economy. In this seminar, I review several research directions developed under this concept: baroplastics, functional polymers whose order–disorder transitions are reversibly controlled by pressure; MAGIQ, a nanoemulsification process inspired by the dynamic high-temperature conditions of deep-sea hydrothermal vents; and SPOT, a highly sensitive visual assay for enzymatic activity derived from the survival strategies of deep-sea microorganisms. These examples collectively demonstrate how fundamental principles of the deep-sea environment can be systematically translated into new strategies for materials design and reaction engineering.
