News & Views

Selective electrochemical oxidation of ammonia provides an ideal pathway to synthesize hydrazine, but this process is outcompeted by a more favourable overoxidation to N₂. A molecular ruthenium catalyst has now flipped the script, circumventing the thermodynamic challenges to selectively generate hydrazine.

CRISPR-Cas9 is a major gene-editing tool that has attracted tremendous interdisciplinary efforts to ameliorate precise genome manipulation. Now, the pivotal structural features behind concerted double-stranded DNA cleavages by the Cas9 endonuclease have been captured through cryo-electron microscopy, laying the groundwork for improved Cas9 engineering.

The selective oxidation of methane to methanol using O₂ under mild conditions has been a challenge for decades. Now, this transformation is selectively achieved at ambient temperature with productivity as high as 67.4 μmol g_cat⁻¹ h⁻¹ on a reduced phosphomolybdate catalyst, where H₂ is required to keep the catalyst surface in a reduced state.

The electrochemical conversion of carbon dioxide to high-value multicarbon products is very desirable, but also fraught with immense complexity in process design. A twist in tuning product yields in this reaction could be based on water activity.

The electrochemical reduction of CO₂ in strong acids is difficult. Now a strategy utilizing immobilized cations significantly enhances system stability and efficiency, opening up avenues for optimized CO₂ conversion to C₂ products.

Enzymes are capable of controlling the reactivity and selectivity of catalytic mechanisms involving highly reactive intermediates. Now, flavine mononucleotide-dependent ene-reductases have been repurposed as photobiocatalysts for generating and taming unstable N-centred radicals, enabling their application in asymmetric radical C–N couplings.

Directed evolution has been extensively used to develop enzymes with enhanced properties, but there are limited examples of diverting key intermediates in catalytic cycles down alternative pathways. Now, a cytochrome P450 variant with promiscuous catalytic activity has been repurposed into a ketone synthase for the catalytic aerobic oxidation of internal alkenes to ketones.

Ethylene glycol is traditionally manufactured through energy-intensive thermocatalytic processes. Now, in a marked advance, a cascade catalytic system using electrochemically synthesized H₂O₂ for ethylene oxidation has been introduced. This strategy represents a benchmark for sustainable chemical manufacturing.

The chlor-alkali industry is one of the largest global electricity consumers. In the 1970s, the discovery of dimensionally stable anodes (DSAs) allowed for drastic savings in electricity consumption. The fundamental reasons behind the effectiveness of DSAs, however, were only clarified decades later.

The d-band model was proposed by Bjørk Hammer and Jens Nørskov almost 30 years ago to explain trends in the interaction of adsorbates with transition-metal surfaces. It remains a cornerstone in heterogeneous catalysis research and has inspired a wealth of later models.

Scientific research on human insulin was a crucial development in medicine, and its discovery led to the treatment of diabetes, one of the most prevalent global chronic diseases. A seminal work published in 1979 describing recombinant DNA technology to produce human insulin through biocatalysis has resulted in this field’s establishment and routine industrial applications.

The conditions employed for alkane dehydrogenation reactions are usually detrimental for catalyst stability. Now, subnanometre Pt clusters stabilized by the Ge-enriched double four-membered-ring units in a UTL-type zeolite structure show exceptionally high stability for this important transformation.

Linear polyethylene and isotactic polypropylene, the two largest-volume polymers on the market, were invented in the 1950s thanks to diverse mixes of serendipity, intuition and talent. After 70 years, a thoughtful revisitation of those ground-breaking discoveries can still be revealing and inspirational.

Proton exchange membrane fuel cell catalyst layers (CLs) have complex structures that largely determine their performance and durability. Their three-dimensional morphology and component spatial distribution is still poorly understood. This comprehensive work reports one of the first cryogenic transmission electron tomography reconstructions of a full commercial CL section, including challenging-to-image ionomer distribution.

The issue of gas solubility has profound implications for studying the activity of oxygen reduction reaction electrocatalysts. Aqueous solutions endowed with permanent microporosity — termed microporous water — could be the answer.

The discovery of the Tetrahymena group I intron’s self-splicing defined RNAs as capable catalysts. Now, cryogenic electron microscopy structures of this ribozyme have revealed large conformational changes and mechanistic details of its two-step mode of action.

In a standard electrochemistry experiment, the electrochemical signal reports on all electron transfer, chemical, and diffusion steps between the anode and cathode. Now, a membrane reactor decouples each of these steps to enable direct measurement of elementary reaction steps in ways that are otherwise not possible.

Electrochemical hydride (H^–) transfer has been an elusive process. Now, using well-designed model systems, the phenomenon has been isolated and further demonstrated as a practical synthetic method with H₂ gas as the hydrogen source.

Microporous zeolites have pores of molecular dimension that can stabilize desired chemical pathways but may also introduce mass-transfer limitations. Now, synthesis protocols allow for greater control of catalyst active-site location via elemental zoning, enabling an alternative strategy to reduce mass-transfer limitations and consequently improve catalyst performance for methanol-to-hydrocarbon reactions.

Electron transfer processes are almost ubiquitous, yet hard to understand thoroughly due to the variability of catalytic species involved. Now, a detailed mechanistic picture of the electron transfer associated with polypyridine nickel systems has been reported, offering an answer to the electron transfer puzzle of these complexes.