Using biomimicry to design greener and more sustainable transformations of organic chemicals

Speaker: Dr Andrew C. Marr School of Chemistry & Chemical Engineering, Queen’s University Belfast, Northern Ireland.

Nature provides great inspiration for a more resilient and circular chemical industry, in better balance with our natural environment. This lecture will explore some of our nature-inspired research in chemistry that has a positive impact on the environment. Bioinspired biocatalytic and molecular chemocatalytic approaches will be used to transform organic chemicals in a greener way using tools of ionic liquids and gels to manipulate the local environment around the active site, protect good reactivity, and assist separation and recycling. Biomass to organic chemicals, catalytic oxidation of organic contaminants in water and enzyme entrapment in gels will be discussed.

Bibliography

Andrew Marr completed a PhD at the University of St Andrews in 1998 on industrial organometallic catalysis under Prof. David Cole-Hamilton. After PDRA positions on bioorganometallic chemistry with Prof. Martin Schröder, and ligand synthesis with Prof. Paul Pringle, he was appointed to a McClay Fellowship (2001) followed by a faculty position in Chemistry (2004) in Queen’s University Belfast. He is Reader in Green & Sustainable Chemistry, a Fellow of The Royal Society of Chemistry and the Institute of Chemistry of Ireland, and an Associate Editor of ACS Sustainable Chemistry & Engineering.

Selected publications

• 1,3-Propanediol, an Exemplary Bio-Renewable Organic Platform Chemical, A.C. Marr, Adv. Synth. Catal. 2024, 366, 4835–4845.
• Supramolecular Ionic Liquid Gels for Enzyme Entrapment, H.T. Imam, K. Hill, A. Reid, S. Mix, P.C. Marr, A.C. Marr, ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2023, 11, 6829–6837.
• Enzyme entrapment, biocatalyst immobilization without covalent attachment, H.T. Imam, P. C. Marr, A.C. Marr, Green Chem. 2021, 23, 4980–5005.
• Designing Materials for Aqueous Catalysis: Ionic Liquid Gel and Silica Sphere Entrapped Iron-TAML Catalysts for Oxidative Degradation of Dyes. P. McNeice, A. Reid, H.T. Imam, C. McDonagh, J.D. Walby, T.J. Collins, A.C. Marr, P.C. Marr, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2020, 54, 14026–14035.
• Basic Ionic Liquid Gels for Catalysis: Application to the Hydrogen Borrowing Mediated Dehydration of 1,3-Propanediol. K. M. Bothwell, F. Lorenzini, E., Mathers, P. C. Marr, A. C. Marr. ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng., 2019, 7, 2686–2690.