We’re glad to announce a new publication on ChemBioChem journal!
Living diatoms are promising candidates for the eco-friendly removal of toxic contaminants. Here we demonstrate the stabilization of a diatom biofilm on a glassy surface protruding boronic acid moieties groups thanks to the interaction with vicinal diols of diatoms extracellular polysaccharides. This system, resistant to mechanical stress, has been tested for the removal of metal ions (As, Cr, Cu, Zn, Sn, Pb, Sb) in model-polluted seawater samples.

https://doi.org/10.1002/cbic.202300284

Join us for two exciting science evenings with Prof. Gianluca Farinola on May 22nd and Dr. Davide Blasi on May 23rd.
Let's come together to celebrate science, knowledge, and the power of curiosity.
We hope to see you there!
For further information, please check here: https://pintofscience.it/events/bari

We are thrilled to announce that Gianfranco has successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis in Chemical and Molecular Sciences and has officially earned his doctorate. We are incredibly proud of his hard work and dedication to his research, and we can't wait to see what he will accomplish in the future.
Congratulations on this outstanding achievement, Gianfranco!

Our latest work on organic chiral materials, performed in collaboration with Lorenzo Di Bari's group of University of Pisa, has been accepted on Chemistry - A European Journal!
We studied the impact of achiral substituents on the chiral supramolecular architectures of diketopyrrolo[3,4-c]pyrrole–1,2,3-1H-triazole (DPP) dyes. The same chiral DPP motif was decorated with three different achiral substituents on the nitrogen atoms of lactam moiety: the hydrophobic n-octyl alkyl chain, the hydrophilic triethylene glycol (TEG) chain and the thermo-cleavable t-butoxycarbonyl (t-Boc) carbamate group. In spite of identical π-conjugated chromophore and chiral appendage, in aggregated form these three dyes displayed profoundly different optical, chiroptical, electrochemical and thermal features. As the typical enantiopure alkyl chains from natural sources used for this purpose are quite limited, the possibility of modulating chiroptical properties of π-conjugated systems by keeping the same chiral appendage is a very important point.

Read the full text of the article at https://doi.org/10.1002/chem.202300291

Three PhD students from our research group are participating in E-WISPOC 2023. In the poster session, Alessandro Digregorio, Mariella Marangi and Matteo Martina presented their work. Matteo was also invited to present his work in a Flash Talk and Alessandro won the Poster Award!

It’s a pleasure to share our new publication on EurJOC: for the first time the electro-optical properties of a highly fluorinated trityl radical were studied, achieving the most blue-shifted emission for a trityl radical reported in literature up to now.
https://doi.org/10.1002/ejoc.202201030

Our PhD student Cesar Vicente-Garcia has participated in the “Festival della Scienza 2022” at Genoa, along with the other members of the BEEP ITN. Our workshop “Communicare con la luce - colori strutturali sottomarini” or “To communicate with light – structural colors underwater” has brought closer to the public beautiful phenomena such as structural color or fluorescence, that can be found in many organisms, both on land and underwater.

We are glad to share our new paper, published on Green Chemistry Letters and Reviews: in this work a detailed study on the ethanosolv lignin fractionation from endocarps of walnut and pistachio, aiming at understanding the role played by the ball milling (BM) pretreatment, is presented.
https://doi.org/10.1080/17518253.2022.2143244

Our group has hosted the “BEEP Summer School” this September at the very special location of Santa Maria al Bagno. We have finally had the opportunity to meet in person and share everybody’s work and ideas. Different activities have taken place: progress reports, meetings, invited speakers’ talks, workshops and even some friendly competitions.

The FarinolaGroup is present in Lisbon for participating in the EuChemS Chemistry Congres with four oral communication! Prof. Gianluca Farinola showed all the powerful opportunities of functional biohybrid nanomaterials from diatoms microalgae recently developed in our group, our Post-Doc Gianluigi Albano presented his last results on the IR irradiation-promoted Pd-catalyzed cross-dehydrogenative coupling, our PhD student Gianfranco Decandia presented our recent work on IR-assisted direct arylation reactions during the "Green Chemistry" session and the last oral communication of the group: our Post-Doc Giorgio Rizzo showed our recent results on the synthesis, characterization and polymerization of fluorinated dopamine in the "Supramolecular Chemistry" session.

Our Post-Doc Gianluigi Albano received the "Flavio Bonati Prize 2022" of Italian Chemical Society at the Internationale Conference of Coordination Chemistry in Rimini, as the best Italian under-35 researcher in the field of Organometallic Chemistry!

Our research group is currently present at #CIMTEC2022 in Perugia! Prof. Farinola is the chair of the symposium FP "Biological, Biohybrid and Bioinspired Materials: From Electronics and Photonics to Medicine", where the wide community of researchers involved in materials science will be enlarged with high quality lectures of biologists and biotechnologists.

Moreover, our Associated Professor Roberta Ragni held an invited lecture on bio-hybrid materials based on photosynthetic organisms for energy conversion. We are very glad that our results gained much interest from the audience!

For more info please visit: http://2022.cimtec-congress.org/symposium-fp

This morning Prof. Farinola held a lecture on functional materials from living organisms at the School of Nanomedicine 2022 in Rome. The school was also attended by our PostDoc Rossella Labarile and our PhD student Annarita Flemma.

More info at https://www.ba.ic.cnr.it/nanomedicine2022/

Happy to share a new book chapter titled "New insights in luminescent fluorinated transition metal compounds" by our group.
This chapter aims to provide new insights about organometallic compounds having at least one organic ligand substituted with a fluorine atom.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0065305522000235?via%3Dihub

Our PhD student Davide Mesto and reaseacher assistant Erica Colaprico received the Luigi Lopez award for the 2021 best master thesis in organic chemistry in the field of biopolymers among the Departments of Chemistry, Pharmacy and CTF of University of Bari.
The event was organised by Opera Pia Monte di Pietà e Confidenze at the Piccinni Theatre in Bari.

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Today Prof. Farinola will hold a plenary lecture on photosynthetic microorganisms as functional materials at the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology!

The Front Cover shows a vortex of silk threads: From Bombyx mori cocoons, the silk fibroin-supported Palladium catalyst is prepared and successfully applied in the Suzuki-Miyaura and Ullmann coupling reactions of aryl chlorides for the synthesis of biaryl products. Cover design by Gianfranco Decandia and Antonio Guaiana.

Three PhD students of our research group are participating to the event "Maratona di giovani idee per lo sviluppo sostenibile #TheFutureIsYours" winner of the CRUI call "University 4 EU - Il tuo futuro, la nostra Europa" organized by the University of Bari "Aldo Moro", BSc in Environmental Sciences.
Mariella Marangi, Annarita Flemma and Valeria Sini, together with Prof. Roberta Ragni and Dr. Pietro Cotugno, presented their doctoral research and supported high school students in drafting projects on biodiversity and circular economy.

https://www.politicheeuropee.gov.it/it/conferenza-sul-futuro-delleuropa/eventi-it/31-marzo-2022-taranto/

The Interdivisional Group of Organometallic Chemistry (GICO) of the Italian Chemical Society assigned to our Post-Doc Gianluigi Albano the “Flavio Bonati Prize” 2022, as the best under 35 Italian researcher working in the field of Organometallic Chemistry. The awards ceremony will be held during the next congress of GICO, which this year will be hosted in the International Conference on Coordination Chemistry 2022 (ICCC2022) scheduled in Rimini from 28 August to 2 September 2022, where Gianluigi will also hold an Invited Lecture on his current research activity. Huge congratulations to Gianluigi from all of us!