Specific programme: COST – European Cooperation in Science and Technology
UPV/EHU Partner Status: Member of Management Committee
UPV/EHU PI: Kepa Ruiz Mirazo
Project start: 03/12/2013
Project end:   02/12/2017

Brief description: This Action brings together over 80 European research groups focusing on complex chemical systems or Systems Chemistry. Complex systems are all around us, ranging from ecosystems, to global infrastructure and computational grids and social networks. Complexity science is well developed in many disciplines, including sociology, physics and biology, but has remained underdeveloped in chemistry. Yet, of all disciplines, chemistry probably harbors the richest diversity of all complex systems, since it deals with the smallest entities that can still be readily manipulated: molecules. A stunning example of what may emerge from chemical complexity is life. Yet life is only one example, and with the creativity that comes natural to chemists many other systems may be created.
Until recently the development of complex chemical systems has been next to impossible, due to a lack of tools for analyzing complex mixtures. However with the recent advances in instrumentation, complex mixtures are now tractable, opening up a huge, exciting and fundamentally new research field. This field is the chemical counterpart to two topical areas in biology: systems biology and synthetic biology. Where the latter fields take a top-down approach, developing complex chemical systems takes place from the bottom up. The advantages of a bottom-up approach are in the ability to control every component and in the unlimited structural variety that is at the synthetic chemist's disposal. The momentum in this field of complex chemical systems is gathering rapidly, but it remains fragmented. Researchers from the mostly unconnected fields of the origin of life, supramolecular chemistry and researchers working on far-from-equilibrium systems are now independently converging on the central topic Systems Chemistry. This COST Action is at the heart of this exciting development.