cÉcile roche

You're at Sydney University on an exchange program, is that right?

I am not exactly on an exchange program, I am doing a "Cotutelle PhD", which is a Joint/Double-Badged Doctoral Degree. That means that I’m supervised by professors both from Sydney and my French University, the University of Strasbourg (Professor Max Crossley and Professor Jean-Pierre Sauvage, respectively).

What made you come to Sydney to study?

I came to Sydney to study because I thought it would be a good experience for me to do some research in a foreign, English-speaking country. I find collaborative projects very interesting because they combine researchers areas of expertise. I thought that I would learn more if I did a Cotutelle PhD. Indeed, I learnt a lot about the chemistry of interlocked compounds like rotaxanes while in Strasbourg and now I am perfecting my skills and knowledge in porphyrin chemistry here in Australia. I studied in Sydney on an exchange program when I was doing my Masters and I thought it was a really nice place to live in. So I am very happy to be back!    

What are you making in the lab?

My project is inspired by a class of proteins called chaperonins. The role is these proteins is to assist other proteins in their folding process. This function would be really difficult to reproduce with a synthetic system, and we are not that ambitious. So our goal is to make a system that can trap a guest molecule and change its conformation by squeezing it. We called our model a molecular press. We chose to use porphyrins as plates for our press and to assemble several components in a rotaxane structure to form an adaptable molecular receptor. In practice, I spend most of my time doing organic chemistry in the lab in order to synthesise the building blocks needed.

So using organic synthesis allows you to answer some interesting biological questions?

Ultimately, we aim to make an adaptable molecular receptor that can trap oligopeptides and to gain an insight into the mechanism of protein folding. But first, we want to prove that we can change the conformation of a substrate by means of an external constraint, and the substrates are not necessarily of biological relevance. My project is mostly a synthetic challenge for the organic chemist.

Do you have an idea of what you'd like to do after your PhD?

I find science fascinating and I would like to keep doing research after my PhD. I hope to do a postdoc and then get an academic position, maybe back in France, in Australia or elsewhere. I am interested in the field of molecular machines, and more generally in self-assembly and supramolecular chemistry. I am also interested in optically active molecules and their applications. I would like to study these fields and maybe combine them in my future research.