Guichard Team Biomimetic Chemistry of Peptides and Proteins

Design and synthesis of systems with protein-like structures and functions

Visit the website

Guichard Team Biomimetic Chemistry of Peptides and Proteins
Based in Bordeaux, our group’s research focuses on the biomimetic chemistry of peptides and proteins. We are interested in designing and elaborating synthetic molecular systems with protein like structure and functions, to investigate their molecular recognition properties and develop their biomedical applications.
Although centered on chemical synthesis, our research program is based on a multidisciplinary approach involving spectroscopic studies, structural analyses, combinatorial techniques, and binding studies. NMR and X-ray crystallography play a major role in the advancement of our research, allowing atomic description and facilitating the design of foldamer-based protein mimics and nanostructures. In recent years, our group has also gained interest in foldamer-based catalysis and in the structure-guided design of peptidomimetics and foldamers as inhibitors of protein-protein interactions with a focus on cancer-related and bacterial targets.

Team Leader

  • GUICHARD Gilles
  • CNRS Research Director
  • 05 40 00 30 20
  • %67%2e%67%75%69%63%68%61%72%64%40%69%65%63%62%2e%75%2d%62%6f%72%64%65%61%75%78%2e%66%72
GUICHARD Gilles

Gilles Guichard was born in Orléans, France in 1969. He studied chemistry at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Chimie in Toulouse and at the University of Montpellier. He received his PhD from the University Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg (1996). After post-doctoral research with Prof. Dieter Seebach at the ETH in Zürich (1997), he joined the Institut de Biologie Moléculaire et Cellulaire (IBMC) in Strasbourg as a CNRS Chargé de Recherche (1998). Since 2006 he has been a CNRS Research Director. In 2009, he moved as a new group leader to the Institut Européen de Chimie et de Biologie (IECB) in Bordeaux and to the Institute of Chemistry and Biology of Membranes and Nano-objects (CBMN).

He received the CNRS Bronze Medal in 2001, the Grammaticakis-Neuman award from the Académie des sciences in 2019 and the DCO prize from the Société Chimique de France in 2020. He served as president of the “Groupe Français des Peptides et des Protéines” (GFPP) from 2007-2009. He is a co-founder of ImmuPharma and UREkA Sarl, two drug discovery and development companies focused on developing novel medicines to treat serious medical conditions.

Functions fulfilled by proteins depend to a large extent on the ability of the intrinsically flexible polypeptide chain to fold correctly into well-ordered and compact tertiary structures and eventually to (self-)assemble. Multiple approaches, at the interface between biology, synthetic organic and polymer chemistries are currently being developed to elaborate synthetic systems with protein-like structures and functions.
By using peptidomimetic chemistry, the general aims of our research are (i) to understand how to program molecules with the necessary information for self-ordering into complex and functional architectures, (ii) to create folded systems mimicking protein secondary structure elements (e.g. helices), (iii) to study interactions with biomolecules and to develop biomedical applications.

People

COMPAIN Guillaume

UB associate professor

DOLAIN Christel

UB associate professor

DUBOIS-GEOFFROY Pierre

CNRS Postdoctoral researcher

GUICHARD Gilles

CNRS Research Director

GUPTA Naveen

UB Postdoctoral researcher

KURUVA Veeresh

CNRS Postdoctoral researcher

LUTON Anaïs

CIFRE PhD student

MOUMOU Salma

M2

MUMMADI Sandeep

CNRS Postdoctoral researcher

PASCO Morgane

CNRS researcher

QI Chenxiao

CNRS Postdoctoral researcher

SAMUELI Hugues

M2

SOULARD Fabyan

UB PhD student

TOMAR Radha

UB Postdoctoral researcher

VARAJAO Laetitia

UB PhD student

WANG Jiao

CSC PhD student

Latest publications

See all