Reviews & Analysis

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  • The development of bimetallic catalysts is often hindered by the heavy workload of the classical trial-and-error method. Now, a distinct mechanism demonstrates that breaking down the net thermochemical reaction into the corresponding electrochemical half-reactions offers a facile approach to design bimetallic catalysts by analysing each putative half-reaction.

    • Bo-Hang Zhao
    • Bin Zhang
    News & Views
  • While skeletal editing stands as a powerful approach for simplifying synthetic procedures and obtaining complex molecules, viable methodologies remain limited. Now, a smart photoredox protocol, involving the insertion of carbon atoms into the indene core, gives access to a wide library of functionalized naphthalenes.

    • Marina Sicignano
    • Paolo Costa
    News & Views
  • The lack of stability of critical raw material-free electrocatalysts during the oxygen evolution reaction in acidic electrolytes lies beneath the use of Ir-based electrocatalysts in polymeric water electrolysis. Here, a strategy to enhance γ-MnO2 stability in acid is proposed. Theoretical and spectroscopic approaches reveal that increasing the fraction of O atoms in the appropriate position, namely Opla, prevents Mn dissolution during water electrolysis.

    • Sergio Rojas
    News & Views
  • The coenzyme Q biosynthetic pathway has evaded full characterization for decades, in part due to the inherent insolubility of coenzyme Q and the instability of its membrane-associated biosynthetic enzymes. Now, researchers have resurrected an active ancestral coenzyme Q metabolon in vitro that has unveiled valuable insights into previously uncharacterized aspects of coenzyme Q biosynthesis.

    • Kelsey J. Feustel
    • Catherine F. Clarke
    News & Views
  • A deeper understanding of reaction mechanisms should lead to improvements in the selectivity of organic electrosynthesis methods. This approach has now been used to explain the role of magnesium diacetate in the Ag-electrocatalysed reductive coupling of sp3 organic chlorides with aldehydes or ketones with increased selectivity for the desired alcohol product.

    • Angel Cuesta
    News & Views
  • Chiral BINOL-phosphates have qualified as privileged Brønsted acid organocatalysts, providing solutions to many challenging enantioselective transformations for a wide range of substrates under mild reaction conditions. Here we revisit the story of their origins.

    • Svetlana B. Tsogoeva
    News & Views
  • The ab initio atomistic thermodynamics approach, coined by Reuter and Scheffler formally in 2001, remains pivotal for understanding and predicting the stable surfaces of thermal catalysts under technical conditions.

    • Taehun Lee
    • Aloysius Soon
    News & Views
  • Traditional catalyst synthesis primarily hinges on liquid-phase methods. Nevertheless, a quarter of a century ago, the advent of vapour-phase methods such as atomic layer deposition opened up important alternatives to atomically tailor catalysts and boost their performance.

    • Matthias Filez
    • Jolien Dendooven
    • Christophe Detavernier
    News & Views
  • Electrocatalysis would not be the same without the rotating disk electrode. Its invention in the mid-twentieth century enabled immense developments, which rendered it a classic technique in electrochemistry. The rotating disk electrode will remain a cornerstone of electrocatalysis with further advances that bridge the gap with real systems.

    • Serhiy Cherevko
    • Ioannis Katsounaros
    News & Views
  • Elucidating the origin of light-induced reaction rate enhancement in plasmonic photocatalysis is very challenging. Now, bimetallic supercrystals are reported to boost photocatalytic hydrogen evolution from formic acid with the sole aid of intensified electric fields.

    • Alberto Naldoni
    News & Views
  • Iron–nitrogen–carbon (FeNC) catalysts are a viable alternative to platinum, but still lack the necessary performance. Now, pyrolysis under forming gas is found as a path to boosting their site density, activity and durability.

    • Ulrike I. Kramm
    • Lior Elbaz
    News & Views
  • Enantioselective synthesis of chiral cyclobutanes via direct cycloaddition of C–C single bonds with C=C double bonds has remained an unmet challenge. Now, a photoelectrocatalytic system enabling asymmetric dehydrogenative [2+2] cycloaddition of alkyl ketones and alkenes has been developed.

    • Yongsheng Tao
    • Cheng Huang
    • Qingquan Lu
    News & Views
  • With climate change concerns deepening, CO2 fixation pathways to produce value-added chemicals are currently of interest. Now, synthetic biology and machine learning help developing such a pathway across modules that have been tested in vivo in Escherichia coli for the production of acetyl coenzyme A.

    • Wei Xiong
    • Yanhe Ma
    News & Views
  • The search for novel biocatalysts for plastic degradation has recently become a hot topic. Now, multiple catalytic triads of well-known serine esterases were introduced into non-catalytic protein nanopores to enable the hydrolysis of PET nanoparticles.

    • Ren Wei
    • Uwe T. Bornscheuer
    News & Views
  • Electrocatalytic NOx reduction (NOxR) to ammonia has recently become an increasingly popular alternative to the more challenging N2 reduction. This Perspective critically assesses the possible ways NOxR could contribute to the ammonia economy and clarifies the necessary steps for a rigorous experimental protocol.

    • Jason John
    • Douglas R. MacFarlane
    • Alexandr N. Simonov
    Perspective
  • Direct CO2-to-C2+ and tandem CO2-to-CO and CO-to-C2+ electrocatalytic systems have been proposed as strategies for sustainable fuel and chemical synthesis. This Perspective considers the role of acidic CO2 gas on the cathodic microenvironment and local pH and draws connections between this and product selectivity in the electrochemical CO2 reduction reaction and the electrochemical CO reduction reaction, focusing on the competition between two major pathways: ethylene/ethanol and acetate.

    • Jung Yoon ‘Timothy’ Kim
    • Chase Sellers
    • Haotian Wang
    Perspective
  • Thanks to a unique set of properties, liquid metal catalysts provide advantages compared to traditional solid systems, yet their potential in heterogeneous catalysis has not been fully explored. This Perspective identifies some of the key advances in the field of liquid metal catalysis, discussing areas where progress is expected through further fundamental understanding as well as reactor engineering.

    • Syeda Saba Fatima
    • Karma Zuraiqi
    • Torben Daeneke
    Perspective
  • Suppressing the formation of oxide encapsulation layers on the active metal during pretreatment would lead to increased catalytic activity in supported catalysts, but controlling the strong metal-support interactions is challenging. Now it is shown that cleverly introducing TiOx patches onto Ru/MnO allows engineering effective oxide–oxide interface channels and avoids oxide overlayer formation, thus improving the performance of CO2 hydrogenation to produce CO.

    • Yuhua Liu
    • Wei Zhang
    News & Views
  • Diverse cytochrome P450s (CYPs) in nature can modify terpenoid scaffolds toward products with higher structural complexity and chemical diversity, but their discovery remains challenging. Now, an Escherichia coli -based gene screening platform enables high-throughput bacterial CYP screening, leading to efficient and diverse terpenoid biosynthesis.

    • Jianing Han
    • Sijin Li
    News & Views