Postdoctoral position : Fast Assembly of Supramolecular-Triggered COF-vesicles into micro-sized singlecrystals – UMET, Lille (14/12/2025)

COFs were first developed in 2005,they are organic materials, made up of dynamic covalent bonds that give them a good self-correcting capacity during their formation, leading to highly crystalline structures. The geometry of the building blocks and the orientation of their reactive groups determine the dimensions, the topology of the network and defines the pore size. For example, a trifunctional planar building block with reactive groups at each vertex bonds can react with a bifunctional linear building block to form a 2D hexagonal lattice (Figure, left). No other multi-dimensional polymerization strategy allows for today to predict and adjust the structure of the network to such a level. Thanks to their properties (tunable porosity, high specific surface area and lightness), COFs are envisaged for numerous applications in storage, molecular separation, catalysis, sensing, optoelectronics, encapsulation and delivery of bioactive molecules. However, there are still bottlenecks limiting further development. Most COFs are isolated as insoluble powders with small crystalline domains, typically on the order of 50 nm. A few studies report the production of large single-crystals of COF (> 15 microns), essentially restricted to imine-linked COF. Nevertheless, they all rely on the chemistry optimization conditions (by changing the catalyst nature for example) and consequently lead to incompressible time-scale reactions despite some incremental improvements (from months to days).

Publié le 14/12/2025