Nanoscience and technology articles within Nature Chemistry

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  • Review Article |

    The emerging field of dissipative DNA nanotechnology aims at developing synthetic devices and nanomaterials with life-like properties such as directional motion, transport, communication or adaptation. This Review surveys how dissipative DNA systems combine the programmability of nucleic-acid reactions with the consumption of energy stored in chemical fuel molecules to perform work and cyclical tasks.

    • Erica Del Grosso
    • , Elisa Franco
    •  & Francesco Ricci

  • Article |

    2D–2D heterostructures are typically held together by van der Waals interactions. Now, an on-device MoS2–graphene heterostructure has been prepared that is covalently linked through a bifunctional molecule featuring a maleimide and a diazonium group. The electronic properties of the resulting heterostructure are shown to be dominated by the molecular interface.

    • Manuel Vázquez Sulleiro
    • , Aysegul Develioglu
    •  & Emilio M. Pérez

  • Article |

    Soft bioelectronic devices have exciting potential applications in robotics, computing and medicine, but they are typically restricted by the requirement for tethers or stiff electrodes. Now, a synthetic nerve has been developed that is bioinspired, wireless and powered by light. By patterning functionalized lipid membrane compartments, information was directionally conveyed using electrochemical signals.

    • Charlotte E. G. Hoskin
    • , Vanessa Restrepo Schild
    •  & Hagan Bayley

  • Article |

    In a similar fashion to its macroscopic counterpart, molecular gearing is a correlated motion of intermeshed molecular fragments against one another. Now it has been shown that photogearing can be used to actively fuel molecular gearing motions with light and concomitantly shift the axis of rotation.

    • Aaron Gerwien
    • , Frederik Gnannt
    •  & Henry Dube

  • Article |

    Information is physical, but the flow between information, energy and mechanics in chemical systems remains largely unexplored. Now, an autonomous molecular motor has been analysed with information thermodynamics, which relates information to other thermodynamic parameters. This treatment provides a general thermodynamic understanding of molecular motors, with practical implications for machine design.

    • Shuntaro Amano
    • , Massimiliano Esposito
    •  & Benjamin M. W. Roberts

  • News & Views |

    The electronic structure of an electrode can affect the electron transfer rate of electrochemical processes at its surface. Now, it has been shown that varying the ‘twist’ angle between two stacked layers of graphene modifies the bilayer electronic structure and provides a new dimension to control interfacial redox activity.

    • Oluwasegun J. Wahab
    •  & Patrick R. Unwin

  • Article |

    Controlling the crystallographic registry of layered materials through interlayer twist angles has introduced a distinctive degree of freedom for tuning their electronic behaviour. Now, the interfacial electrochemical kinetics of solution-phase redox complexes at twisted bilayer graphene electrodes have been modulated by the angle-dependent tuning of moiré-derived flat bands.

    • Yun Yu
    • , Kaidi Zhang
    •  & D. Kwabena Bediako

  • Article |

    Polyoxometalate clusters have been assembled into two-dimensional ‘clusterphene’ layers that are held together by coordination to lanthanide ions and electrostatic interactions with quaternary ammonium cations. The resulting materials resemble graphene sheets on account of their uniform hexagonal pores and are shown to catalyse epoxidation reactions due to their in-plane electron delocalization.

    • Qingda Liu
    • , Qinghua Zhang
    •  & Xun Wang

  • News & Views |

    Innovations in instrumentation together with new strategies of data collection and processing have been shown to solve the problem of data quality for time-resolved in situ X-ray diffraction studies on ball milling, opening new horizons in mechanochemistry.

    • Elena Boldyreva

  • News & Views |

    Bilayer borophene, predicted to be stabilized by interlayer linkages, has now been grown by molecular beam epitaxy on copper and silver surfaces in two independent studies. The growth substrate and temperature are found to influence the lattice structures formed.

    • Maryam Ebrahimi

  • Article |

    Electron spin resonance spectroscopy has traditionally been used to study large ensembles of spins, but its combination with scanning tunnelling microscopy recently enabled measurements on single adatoms. Now, individual iron phthalocyanine complexes adsorbed on a surface have been probed. Their spin distribution partially extends on the phthalocyanine, leading to a strong geometry-dependent exchange coupling interaction.

    • Xue Zhang
    • , Christoph Wolf
    •  & Taeyoung Choi

  • Article |

    Several polymorphs of borophene have been synthesized on metal substrates, but typically as monolayers. Now large-size, single-crystalline bilayer borophene has been grown on Cu(111)—a sufficient electron provider to enable the bonding of the second boron layer. The resulting bilayer possesses a metallic character and is less susceptible to oxidation than its monolayer counterpart.

    • Caiyun Chen
    • , Haifeng Lv
    •  & Lan Chen

  • Article |

    Layered materials held together by weak interactions can be exfoliated into monolayers that retain the structure and composition of their bulk counterpart, but this has remained challenging to achieve for non-van der Waals materials. Now, AgCrS2 has been exfoliated into such [CrS2]Ag[CrS2] nanosheets through intercalation with tetraalkylammonium cations chosen for their suitable redox potential. The nanosheets show superionic behaviour at room temperature.

    • Jing Peng
    • , Yuhua Liu
    •  & Yi Xie

  • Article |

    In biological systems, controlled molecular motion along a particular path is realized by protein motors that travel along microtubule filaments. Now, control of motion with light has been achieved in a synthetic supramolecular system, in which anionic porphyrin molecules move along the fibres of a bis-imidazolium gel upon irradiation.

    • Mario Samperi
    • , Bilel Bdiri
    •  & David B. Amabilino

  • Article |

    Spin-crossover nanoparticles have been covalently grafted onto a semiconducting MoS2 layer to form a self-strainable heterostructure. Under light or thermal stimulus, the nanoparticles switch between their high- and low-spin states, in which they have different volumes. This generates a reversible strain over the MoS2 layer and, in turn, alters the electrical and optical properties of the heterostructure.

    • Ramón Torres-Cavanillas
    • , Marc Morant-Giner
    •  & Eugenio Coronado

  • News & Views |

    Charged nanoparticles can behave as large ions or as small colloids. Their interaction with multivalent ions has now been shown to reflect this dichotomy, providing new paths to large, self-assembled nanoparticle superstructures.

    • Tobias Kraus

  • Article |

    Coulombic interactions can be used to assemble charged nanoparticles into higher-order structures, but this process typically requires similarly sized oppositely charged partners. Now, small anions or cations with as few as three charges have been shown to induce attractive interactions between oppositely charged nanoparticles in water, guiding the assembly of colloidal crystals.

    • Tong Bian
    • , Andrea Gardin
    •  & Rafal Klajn

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Tailoring the size and connectivity of organic nanostructures is challenging but is often key in molecular electronics for tuning the properties of the quantum materials. Now an approach has been developed for building low-dimensional covalent architectures block by block on a surface by highly selective tip-induced intermolecular reactions.

    • Qigang Zhong
    • , Alexander Ihle
    •  & Daniel Ebeling

  • News & Views |

    Self-organization — ubiquitous in living systems — occurs out-of-equilibrium, with dissipation of energy and matter. Researchers have now shown that slow proton dissipation switches the assembly of DNA-based fibres to a growth mechanism that heals their gaps, yielding tight nanocable architectures.

    • Mathieu Surin

  • Article |

    Nature uses out-of-equilibrium systems to control hierarchical assembly. Now, a dissipative chemical system has been shown to slowly release monomer DNA strands from a high-energy reservoir, regulating self-assembly by switching the mechanism of supramolecular polymerization at the single-molecule level. This process heals fibre defects, converting branched, heterogeneous networks into nanocable superstructures.

    • Felix J. Rizzuto
    • , Casey M. Platnich
    •  & Hanadi F. Sleiman

  • News & Views |

    Among the tens of thousands of reported hybrid organic–inorganic crystals, only a small fraction of them are known to form a stable liquid upon heating. Now, a family of hybrid perovskites is shown to melt and, upon cooling, form glasses with a compelling combination of properties.

    • Morten M. Smedskjaer
    •  & Søren S. Sørensen

  • News & Views |

    Energy transfer from one molecule to another over a distance of nanometres is a fundamental process of widespread relevance. Now, scanning probe techniques have been used to include an intermediary third molecule and to watch how energy flows through it.

    • Klaus Kuhnke

  • Article |

    Transition-metal single-atom catalysts display excellent activity per metal atom site, but suffer from low metal atom densities (typically less than 5 wt% or 1 at.%), which limits their overall catalytic performance. Now, the use of a graphene-quantum-dot primary support, later interweaved into a carbon matrix, has enabled the synthesis of single-atom catalysts with high transition-metal atom loadings of up to 40 wt% or 3.84 at.%.

    • Chuan Xia
    • , Yunrui Qiu
    •  & Haotian Wang

  • Article |

    Methods to detect and identify bacteria typically rely on enrichment steps such as bacterial culture and nucleic acid amplification. Now, an assay for detecting bacteria based on a two-channel electrical chip that combines electroactive DNAzymes with an electrochemical readout, has been developed. This assay enables reagentless and culture-free detection of bacteria in clinical samples.

    • Richa Pandey
    • , Dingran Chang
    •  & Leyla Soleymani

  • Article |

    Although monolayers of N-heterocyclic carbenes (NHCs) readily form on metals, surface reactivity usually hinders their self-assembly on semiconductors. Now, it has been shown that thermally stable, well-ordered monolayers of NHCs can be formed on silicon surfaces. A large reduction in work function is observed and steric effects enable sufficient diffusivity of the NHCs.

    • Martin Franz
    • , Sandhya Chandola
    •  & Mario Dähne

  • Article |

    On-surface, ultra-high vacuum conditions enable two-dimensional polymerizations to be precisely studied—often with submolecular resolution—but these syntheses are typically thermally activated, which can lead to high defect densities and relatively small domain sizes. Now, a self-assembled monolayer of a three-bladed fantrip monomer on alkane-passivated graphite has been covalently crosslinked into a mesoscale-ordered two-dimensional polymer by [4+4] photocycloaddition.

    • Lukas Grossmann
    • , Benjamin T. King
    •  & Markus Lackinger

  • News & Views |

    Colloidal self-assembly requires carefully balanced particle interactions that are often incompatible with the mechanical disturbances associated with macroscopic-scale manufacturing. Now, a practical bottom-up route has enabled the production of bulk solid materials with nanoscale components.

    • Theodore Hueckel
    •  & Stefano Sacanna

  • Article |

    Nanoparticulate platinum is a highly active catalyst, but it is scarce, expensive and not always sufficiently durable. Now, barium platinate has been used as a vehicle to preserve platinum as an oxide during the solid-state synthesis of a Pt-doped titanate perovskite; this enables the production of a structure with active and stable Pt nanoparticles on the perovskite surface that catalyses CO oxidation.

    • Maadhav Kothari
    • , Yukwon Jeon
    •  & John T. S. Irvine

  • Article |

    Open-shell nanographenes are promising for quantum technologies, but their magnetic stability has remained limited by weak exchange coupling. Now, two large rhombus-shaped nanographenes with zigzag peripheries, one with 48 carbon atoms and the other with 70, have been synthesized on gold and copper surfaces. The 70-carbon compound exhibits a large magnetic exchange coupling exceeding 100 meV.

    • Shantanu Mishra
    • , Xuelin Yao
    •  & Roman Fasel

  • Article |

    RNA origami can be used for the modular design of RNA nanoscaffolds but can be challenging to design. Newly developed computer-aided design software has now been shown to improve the folding yield of kilobase-sized RNA origami. These structures fold from a single strand during transcription by an RNA polymerase, and are able to position small molecules and protein components with nanoscale precision.

    • Cody Geary
    • , Guido Grossi
    •  & Ebbe S. Andersen

  • Article |

    A series of dicyanamide-based hybrid organic–inorganic perovskite structures has been shown to melt at temperatures below 300 °C. On melt-quenching, they form glasses that possess coordination bonding and show very low thermal conductivities and moderate electrical conductivities as well as polymer-like thermomechanical properties.

    • Bikash Kumar Shaw
    • , Ashlea R. Hughes
    •  & Thomas D. Bennett

  • News & Views |

    The continuous monitoring of proteins is a current challenge in medical diagnostics. A new electrochemical approach aiming to address this has been described. The method uses antibodies as a recognition element to achieve the real-time measurement of proteins in saliva in the mouth.

    • Kevin J. Cash
    •  & Kevin W. Plaxco

  • Review Article |

    Aromatic hydrocarbon belts consisting of fully fused benzenoid rings have fascinated scientists for over half a century. This Review revisits the protracted historical background of these compounds and features some recent breakthroughs in their rational design and synthesis, including the challenges faced in the precise synthesis of carbon-rich materials such as single-walled carbon nanotubes.

    • Qing-Hui Guo
    • , Yunyan Qiu
    •  & J. Fraser Stoddart

  • Article |

    A supramolecular three-shell matryoshka-like complex di rects the functionalization of the C60 inner shell to the selective formation of a single trans-3 fullerene bis-adduct. The selectivity with this matryoshka-like approach could be useful for applications where regioisomerically pure C60 bis-adducts have been shown to have superior properties compared with isomer mixtures.

    • Ernest Ubasart
    • , Oleg Borodin
    •  & Xavi Ribas

  • News & Views |

    Modelling the structure and behaviour of vesicles in cells requires liposomes with precise sizes, but producing liposomes with a narrow size distribution is challenging. An approach has now been developed to accurately size-sort liposomes in a scalable way by coating them with customized structures based on DNA nanotechnology.

    • Silvia Hernández-Ainsa

  • Article |

    Small liposomes of uniform sizes are valuable tools for studying membrane biology and developing drug-delivery vehicles. Now, a DNA-assisted sorting technique has been shown to produce multiple species of monodispersed liposomes with mean diameters below 150 nm in a scalable manner. This approach has enabled the high-resolution analyses of curvature-dependent membrane protein activities.

    • Yang Yang
    • , Zhenyong Wu
    •  & Chenxiang Lin

  • Article |

    On-surface dehydrogenative bond formation between sp3-hybridized carbon atoms usually requires high temperatures. Now, it has been shown that the higher homologue, silicon, can undergo dehydrogenative polymerization at room temperature on metal surfaces. This process creates well-ordered structures on Au(111) and Cu(111), with different stereoselectivity depending on the metal.

    • Lacheng Liu
    • , Henning Klaasen
    •  & Armido Studer

  • Article |

    A reagentless method for detecting analytes based on the motion of an inverted molecular pendulum has now been developed. The sensor is capable of detecting important physiological markers of stress, allergy, cardiovascular health, inflammation and cancer and works in blood, saliva, urine, tears and sweat. The sensor is also capable of collecting data in living animals.

    • Jagotamoy Das
    • , Surath Gomis
    •  & Shana O. Kelley

  • News & Views |

    The first two examples of zigzag carbon nanobelts have been reported. These compounds have been elusive targets for synthetic chemists for 35 years, but strategic structural modifications and mastering challenging multi-step syntheses finally brought success.

    • Birgit Esser
    •  & Mathias Hermann

  • Meeting Report |

    The confined geometry of nanopores enables a wealth of chemistry and analysis to be conducted at the single-molecule scale. Yi-Lun Ying, Aleksandar P. Ivanov and Vincent Tabard-Cossa report on recent developments discussed at the 2020 Nanopore Electrochemistry Meeting.

    • Yi-Lun Ying
    • , Aleksandar P. Ivanov
    •  & Vincent Tabard-Cossa

  • Article |

    A metal–organic framework (MOF) has been prepared that features dynamic rotors embedded within its crystalline lattice. The dipolar F2-functionalized carboxylate linkers—rapidly rotating at room temperature—show correlated behaviour upon cooling, converting the paraelectric MOF into an ordered antiferroelectric one below 100 K.

    • Y.-S. Su
    • , E. S. Lamb
    •  & S. E. Brown

  • Article |

    Stimuli-responsive control of drug activation can mitigate issues caused by poor drug selectivity. Now, it has been shown that mechanical force—induced by ultrasound—can be used to activate drugs in three different systems. This approach has enabled the activation of antibiotics or a cytotoxic anticancer agent from synthetic polymers, polyaptamers and nanoparticle assemblies.

    • Shuaidong Huo
    • , Pengkun Zhao
    •  & Andreas Herrmann

  • Article |

    The controllable functionalization of graphene at the molecular level may prove useful for graphene-based electronics, but is difficult to do in a precise fashion. Now it has been shown that a photocycloaddition reaction between a hydrogen-bonded network of maleimide-derived molecules and single-layer graphene can produce a functionalized array with long-range order.

    • Miao Yu
    • , Chong Chen
    •  & Federico Rosei

  • Article |

    A six-helix bundle DNA structure called meta-DNA has now been assembled and shown to possess some structural properties similar to those of single-stranded DNA. Two meta-DNAs containing complementary ‘meta-base pairs’ are shown to form double helices. Meta-DNA building blocks are also used to construct a series of DNA architectures and to perform a hierarchical strand-displacement reaction.

    • Guangbao Yao
    • , Fei Zhang
    •  & Hao Yan

  • Article |

    Multivalent binding is a common strategy to enhance the interactions between weak binding partners. Now, following this principle, DNA origami scaffolds have been used to arrange DNA aptamers into specific geometries and to optimize linker spacings and flexibilities, which results in artificial binding sites with very high affinities for their corresponding ligands.

    • Ali Aghebat Rafat
    • , Sandra Sagredo
    •  & Friedrich C. Simmel

  • News & Views |

    Single-molecule magnets are able to store information through their magnetic anisotropy, making them very promising systems for memory applications. Now, femtosecond-laser-initiated molecular dynamics that modulate magnetic anisotropy have been observed, paving the way for operation on ultrafast timescales.

    • Eric Collet

  • News & Views |

    A series of mesoscale supramolecular hexagonal grids have been constructed in solution through stepwise intra- then intermolecular coordination-driven self-assembly, and characterized with atomic resolution by scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy.

    • Ruoning Li
    •  & Yongfeng Wang

  • Article |

    The photoinduced dimerization of a prochiral anthracenecarboxylic acid occurs in an enantioselective fashion when the molecules are adsorbed on helical metal nanostructures. This enantiopreference arises mostly from the helicity of the silver and copper substrates—prepared using shear forces during the deposition process—and may also be influenced by chiroplasmonic effects.

    • Xueqin Wei
    • , Junjun Liu
    •  & Zhifeng Huang

  • Article |

    Metal-mediated self-assembly in solution typically leads to small two- and three-dimensional architectures on scales smaller than 10 nm, but now a series of large, discrete, two-dimensional supramolecular hexagonal grids have been prepared through a combination of intra- and intermolecular coordination interactions. These 20-nm-wide grids have been imaged at submolecular resolution using scanning tunnelling microscopy.

    • Zhe Zhang
    • , Yiming Li
    •  & Xiaopeng Li

  • News & Views |

    A balance between order and disorder provides living materials with just the right amount of disorder needed to sustain life. This feature is currently not found in synthetic materials. Now, a route to the production of composite membranes that are simultaneously stiff and reconfigurable upon contact has been developed.

    • Ankit Jain
    •  & Rein V. Ulijn

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