Egon Heuson, Franck Dumeignil, Fabio Bellot-Noronha and Sébastien Paul are pleased to announce that they have received funding for their Horizon Europe – MSCA Doctoral Networks (AAP: HORIZON-MSCA-2022-DN-01) project, dubbed “DEMO”. The project’s full title is “Discovery of efficient Enzyme-like Metal Organic frameworks to activate biomethane at low temperature”.

Since it is an MSCA Doctoral Networks project, its primary goal is to train doctoral students in cutting-edge scientific fields, with a strong teaching component. For this purpose, 13 PhD students will be recruited as part of the project, each jointly supervised by the partners. Four theses will be directly supervised by the members of the UCCS involved in the project.

Regarding the scientific work programme, the project will aim to:

  1. Encapsulate several families of enzymes capable of oxidizing short-chain alkanes within metal-organic frameworks (MOFs), with the priority target of converting biomethane into methanol;
  2. Draw inspiration from the active site of these enzymes and their interactions with MOFs, to design new MOFs presenting active metal centres, for the same application;
  3. Compare the performance, benefits and weaknesses of the two types of catalysts, in order to eventually consider the possible combination of the two;
  4. Develop the continuous flow use of the two types of catalysts generated using new reactors.

These objectives will be assisted by the use of high-speed screening (in particular on REALCAT) as well as by machine learning with several of our partners.

With a total duration of 48 months, the project brings together 9 partners (6 academic and 3 industrial), and is coordinated by Professor Pedro Luis Arias of the Universidad del Pais Vasco in Bilbao (Spain). It received €3.5 million in financing, including €850,000 (24%) for the UCCS (CNRS).

If you have any questions about the project, by all means contact them.