Protein-inspired self-assembled monolayers for contaminant removal and resource recovery from water

• Applicant: Dr.-Ing. Lukas Müller
• Subject Area: Solid State and Surface Chemistry, Material Synthesis ; Synthesis and Properties of Functional Materials
• Term: since 2026
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 578379873

Water pollution is a pressing peril in the 21st century. Some of the molecular and ionic pollutants are known to negatively impact the environment or human health, while other are still valuable and could be reused. Today we do not have a satisfactory solution to selectively remove and recover such concerning species from water. However, nature evolutionarily developed very selective and reversible binding domains for many such molecules and ions via molecular self-assembly of simple building blocks in proteins. This project aims at mimicking the function of such binding domains in ultra-thin coatings of simple molecules, so-called self-assembled monolayers (SAMs). By random co-assembly of simple SAM-forming molecules that carry the inspired binding domain moieties, the formation of statistical superstructures that resemble the domain of interest is proposed. Applying these coatings, for example, to nanoparticles may render very efficient, non-toxic, scalable and highly selective adsorbent materials. Furthermore, such molecular coatings may provide an intrinsic release mechanism by pH changes inspired from denaturation in proteins to recover precious pollutants and recycle the material. While the functional groups that the mixed SAMs provide are taken from their natural role models, their mixing ratio and backbone lengths as well as chemistry are to be optimized. Therefore, the adsorption performances will be screened by quantifying the relative adsorption amounts in pollutant mixtures via chromatographic separation and mass spectrometry. The identified champion SAMs will undergo thorough morphological characterization, which together with the screening results may reveal general design principles that could be used to find de novo SAMs for adsorption of species that do not have known binding domains in proteins. With this project a new class of cost-efficient adsorbent materials for targeted pollutant removal and resource recovery from water could be initiated.

• DFG Programme: WBP Fellowship
• International Connection: USA
• Host: Professor Dr. Seth Marder