Perspectives in 2015

A wide range of different aqueous chemistries for the site-selective modification of proteins have been described over the past decade. This Perspective discusses the scope and potential of chemical site-selective protein-modification methods in the context of their biological and therapeutic applications.

Synthetic vaccines offer one method to avoid the drawbacks associated with vaccines derived from whole organisms. This Perspective highlights the improvements and significant recent progress that has been achieved in developing well-defined synthetic vaccines using a variety of molecular antigens.

C–H functionalization of organic compounds is an ideal yet challenging approach to organic synthesis. This Perspective covers the most recent developments concerning the palladium-catalysed norbornene-mediated C–H functionalization of arenes, including applications of these methodologies in natural products synthesis. Challenges as well as opportunities for future studies are also presented.

One-pot tandem reactions are attractive for both waste and time reduction, but can also enable transformations otherwise unobtainable in single-step processes. This Perspective covers recent advances in orthogonal tandem catalysis, while introducing the concept of thermodynamically leveraging multiple catalytic systems together to perform challenging transformations.

New synthetic routes to porous materials can be developed by taking advantage of a solid's weaknesses. This approach can lead to new products that break the rules of what is currently feasible.