When practiced at its double interface with biology and physics, chemistry produces more than a toolkit for labeling biomolecules or analyzing the cellular composition. Chemistry first brings a specific molecular point of view, which challenges the quantification of interactions and the kinetic analysis of exquisitely complex networks of reactions. This is the first perspective of our research activity: we introduce and implement chemical concepts and tools to interrogate and manipulate biological systems. Chemists have also been inspired by the biological objects and their functions for a long time. This results in their continuous motivation to design and build chemical artifacts (molecules, supramolecules, systems). This is the second perspective, which we have adopted to practice research by favoring the systemic level, which integrates reactions and non-covalent interactions to generate a function.

More specifically, our recent work is concerned with the development of photoactive organic probes, the introduction of reactivity-based protocols for highly selective analyses and imaging, and the design of reactive systems comparable fairly to living chemical microorganisms.