News & Comment

FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable) data practices are necessary to expedite knowledge discovery, encourage collaboration, and optimise resource use, fostering a robust foundation for future scientific progress. Here, the authors explore the use of FAIR practices to advance materials chemistry research, examining key repositories, highlighting their role in sharing scientific data, and examining the accessibility of these approaches.

Communications Chemistry is pleased to introduce a Collection of articles focused on organomediated polymerization. Here, the Guest Editors highlight the themes within and look towards the future of this research field.

Boroxines, resulting from the reversible dehydration of boronic acids, have been incorporated as structural units into functional materials and molecular assemblies, but their applicability is restricted to non-aqueous environments owing to their inherent water instability. Now, a boroxine structure spontaneously formed from the 2-hydroxyphenylboronic acid dimer enables water-compatible dynamic B–O covalent bonds, expanding their future applicability.

Covalent cysteine labeling is an important tool in protein modification, however, current methodologies suffer from limited reactivities and require the prior synthesis of individual derivative reagents. Now, a covalent cysteine labeling method that converts the cysteinyl thiol into episulfonium electrophiles in situ has been developed, enabling reactions with various nucleophiles in one step.

Pomalidomide is an E3 ligase recruiter exploited by PROTACs to degrade target proteins, but its application is hampered by the off-target degradation of other vital endogenous zinc finger (ZF) proteins. Now, the off-target ZF binding of pomalidomide-based PROTACs is evaluated by a high-throughput imaging screening platform, and minimization of off-target degradation as well as enhanced potency are achieved through selective functionalization at the C5 position of the phthalimide ring.

The Guest Editors of Communications Chemistry’s Atomically precise nanochemistry Collection discuss the importance of atomic precision in nanochemistry research, and highlight some of the field’s most pressing challenges.

At Communications Chemistry we are pleased to launch an Editors’ Highlights Collection featuring some of our favourite articles published in the journal in 2023. Here, we highlight each article and outline why it was selected.

Conformational dynamics are integral to enzyme catalysis, yet they are barely explored when designing synthetic catalysts. Now, a catenane-based organocatalyst, which dynamically switches between two conformations, speeds up the catalysis of carbodiimide hydration through spontaneous conformational adaptation for different reaction steps.

Communications Chemistry is delighted to introduce a Collection of research works focused on the modelling and advanced characterization of framework materials. Here, the Guest Editors outline the themes within and look towards the future of the field.

Organic π-conjugated radicals have recently joined the ranks of high-efficiency light-emitting materials, however, their light-emission mechanism is still a matter of debate. Here, the authors highlight a recently proposed luminescent enhancement mechanism and record-breaking efficiency of a radical organic light-emitting diode.

Pupils with vision impairment face significant challenges in learning science. Here, the authors discuss the impact of an inaccessible curriculum and new ideas that can improve accessibility.

The oxygen evolution reaction (OER) is a key enabler of sustainable chemical energy storage. Here, the author assesses the current status of protocols for benchmarking the OER in materials- and device-centered investigations and makes suggestions for more comparable data.

Molecular skeletal editing has a wide range of applications in late-stage derivatization, but metal–carbon exchange is underexplored due to the challenges in selectively cleaving highly inert chemical bonds and forming stable intermediates. Here, skeletal metalation of lactams enables a carbonyl-to-nickel exchange via Ni(0) reagent-mediated selective C–N bond oxidative addition and decarbonylation, generating synthetically useful organonickel reagents for the deletion and exchange of single atoms in the lactam core.

Andrew Goodwin is Professor of Materials Chemistry and a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Oxford. His research focuses on the dual aspects of flexibility and disorder in functional materials, and his group of about 10–15 researchers is based in Oxford’s Inorganic Chemistry Laboratory.

Dr Camille Bishop is an incoming Assistant Professor in the Department of Chemical Engineering and Materials Science at Wayne State University. She obtained her PhD in chemistry at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, where she prepared glasses with liquid crystal-like packing using physical vapor deposition, after obtaining her B.S. in chemistry from the University of Chicago.

Nancy Scott Burke Williams is an Associate Professor of Chemistry at the Keck Science Department of Claremont McKenna, Pitzer, and Scripps Colleges in Claremont, California, where she has been in the faculty since 2003. She was born in Puyallup, WA to Burke and Nancy Williams, from whom she takes most of her names.

Abhik Ghosh grew up in Kolkata, India, and is a Professor of inorganic and materials chemistry at UiT—The Arctic University of Norway. His research interests lie at the intersection of inorganic, materials and computational chemistry.

Dr Jovan Dragelj completed his undergraduate and Master’s studies in chemistry in Belgrade, Serbia, after which he worked as a chemistry teacher and researcher at the University of Belgrade. In 2019, he earned his PhD in computational chemistry from Freie Universität Berlin and then pursued postdoctoral studies at Technische Universität Berlin. His research during this period spanned diverse areas, from non-covalent interactions to biocatalysis, with a major focus on studying cytochrome c oxidase and hydrogenase enzymes through multiscale modeling approaches.

Polly Arnold is a Professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley and Director of the Chemical Sciences Division at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the US. Polly’s research focuses on exploratory synthetic chemistry. Such knowledge underpins the discovery of catalysts and our understanding of the behavior of nuclear waste.