Browse Articles

Catalysis has been crucial for the transportation sector, as it has enabled the treatment of automotive exhausts over the years in agreement with evolving environmental regulations. This review details the most important milestones in automotive catalysis, while looking at the future of the field.

S-adenosylmethionine (SAM)-dependent methyltransferase enzymes have significant synthetic potential, but their utility as biocatalysts has been limited by the availability of SAM. An elegant and simple method addressing this long-standing problem has now been developed using a halide methyltransferase (HMT) enzyme for SAM regeneration in vitro.

The production of high-value fuels from bio-derived methanol requires improvement to become economically viable. Here, process advancements for the production of high-octane gasoline are reported, and the effects that these have on making the process competitive with market rates of fossil fuels are analysed.

The synthesis of stereodefined alkenes is challenging, and often relies on the steric bias of the substituents. Here the authors report a photoredox/nickel catalysed difunctionalization of alkynes, giving access to either E- or Z-tri-substituted alkenes, depending on the photocatalyst used.

Electrochemical carbon dioxide reduction is an attractive approach for obtaining fuels and chemical feedstocks using renewable energy. In this Review, the authors describe progress so far, identify mechanistic questions and performance metrics, and discuss design principles for improved activity and selectivity.

Biocompatibility plays a crucial role for the development of artificial metalloenzymes (ArMs) for therapeutic applications. This work presents an ArM with a ruthenium catalyst that is protected from physiological glutathione and accumulates in cancer cell lines for metathesis-mediated prodrug activation.

The synthesis of ethanol via CO₂ hydrogenation is a challenging process, often hampered by low selectivity. This work reports a Zr₁₂ cluster-based metal–organic framework as support for cooperative Cu(i) sites that catalyse CO₂ hydrogenation to ethanol with remarkable selectivity upon promotion with caesium. Credit: Cloud background, CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

First-principles-based multiscale models provide mechanistic insight and allow screening of large materials spaces to find promising new catalysts. In this Review, Reuter and co-workers discuss methodological cornerstones of existing approaches and highlight successes and ongoing developments in the field.

The fleeting nature of transition state ensembles of protein motions has precluded their experimental observation. This work provides an atomistic insight into the rate-determining structural transition of adenylate kinase during catalysis by high-pressure NMR and molecular dynamics simulations.

Combining enzymatic and heterogeneous catalysts is challenging due to different reaction requirements. Here, a method is presented constructing single protein–polymer nanoconjugates as nanoreactors for the in situ synthesis of enzyme–metal nanohybrids with high activity at ambient conditions.

Understanding the nature of active sites in carbon electrocatalysis remains a subject of dispute and a great scientific challenge. Convincing new evidence supports the fact that, for oxygen reduction, defects present in carbon materials are more powerful catalytic sites than nitrogenated sites.

Regenerating expensive S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) in enzymatic in vitro reactions is challenging—but important for the commercial scope of SAM-dependent enzymes. This work reports a simple two-enzyme cascade for the in vitro regeneration of SAM for the enzymatic methylation of diverse substrates.

Metal oxide alloys are important industrial catalysts, but their structure–activity relationships are poorly understood. Now, a study encompassing a combination of computational tools and machine learning approaches sheds light on the activity and selectivity of zinc–chromium oxides during syngas conversion.

The roughness factor of an electrode has been generally used to increase total rates of production, though rarely as a means to improve selectivity. Now, Jaramillo, Hahn and co-workers direct the selectivity of CO reduction to multicarbon oxygenates at low overpotentials by increasing the roughness factor of nanostructured Cu electrodes.

The active sites of metal-free carbon catalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction remain still elusive. Now, Yao, Dai and co-workers combine work-function analyses with macro/micro-electrochemical measurements on highly oriented pyrolytic graphite and conclude that pentagon defects are the main active sites for acidic oxygen reduction.

Tailoring platinum-based catalysts is of great research interest in the fields of electrochemical energy conversion and storage, as well as other applications. Now, an approach has been developed to boost the activity of platinum catalysts at the atomic scale.

Primary alcohols are known for their broad application in life sciences and the chemical industry. Now, Beller and colleagues present a regioselective, iron-catalysed hydrogenation of aliphatic and aromatic epoxides as a general route to primary alcohols under mild conditions