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In two seminal papers published 25 years ago, Phillips and Remington reported the structure of the green fluorescent protein (GFP). These studies provided a blueprint for the rational engineering of GFP, catalysing efforts that produced a large and growing collection of fluorescent proteins and indicators of cellular activity.
The seminal paper by Yves Chauvin and Jean-Louis Hérisson on the mechanism of alkene metathesis is elegant, simple and insightful. Published more than 50 years ago, it deserves appreciation and admiration even today.
Recent findings on the skeletal rearrangement of polycyclic aromatics under oxidative and acidic conditions are envisioned to help development of these Scholl reactions into a more useful and versatile method for synthesizing polycyclic aromatics on the basis of rational design rather than luck.
Molecular decoders are single host matrices able to differentiate analytes by their distinct structural accommodations. Ten years ago, Susumu Kitagawa and co-workers described the prototypical molecular decoder and paved the way for molecular sensing. We now revisit this seminal study and discuss some of the advances that have followed.
The early 1980s witnessed the report of a molecular ruthenium complex active for dehydrogenation of alcohols and hydrogenation of carbonyl compounds. The ligand used represented a new paradigm that influences homogeneous catalysis to this day.
Finding the best approximation to the exact functional of electron density is the central challenge of density functional theory (DFT). In 2005, Zhao, Schultz and Truhlar paved the way to the development of approximate DFT functionals that can offer universally accurate treatment of different chemical systems and properties.
In a reaction discovered 50 years ago, a disarmingly simple iron catalyst was shown to couple alkenyl halides to alkyl Grignard reagents. This finding led to a proliferation of catalytic methodologies that today are an indispensable part of our synthetic toolkit.
