Review Articles in 2019

A light-driven enzyme that oxidizes H₂O, photosystem II has inspired a wealth of solar fuels research and is used directly in semi-artificial photosynthesis. This Review describes the photosystem–electrode interface, as well as state-of-the-art electrode and biohybrid cell designs, and their importance in bio-photoelectrochemistry and semi-artificial photosynthesis.

Beginning with a historical retrospective, this Review highlights the progress from thermodynamically and kinetically controlled self-assembly processes towards seed-induced living supramolecular polymerization, which allows the formation of highly ordered, functional materials such as supramolecular block copolymers.

The direct functionalization of RNA by selective acylation at the 2′-hydroxyl position is a powerful tool for structural and functional studies. This Review describes the chemical properties and design of effective acylating reagents, highlighting the various applications of RNA acylation.

Enzyme designers can exploit catalytic promiscuity to unlock activities unknown to nature. This Review discusses how repurposing versatile reaction intermediates and creating new ones installs abiological activities into existing, designed and hybrid enzymes, and how directed-evolution strategies readily improve catalysts for these new-to-nature activities.

Cycloparaphenylenes are highly tunable molecular scaffolds. This Review highlights how their cyclic topologies endow them with novel properties amenable to diverse applications.

Achieving precise control over when and where a chemical reaction takes place can open the way to a plethora of new applications. This Review gives an overview of progress made in this quest for high spatial and temporal molecular control.

The propensity of guanine and its derivatives to assemble into guanine quartets makes them a privileged tool in the design of functional supramolecular assemblies. This Review describes the production of such functional suprastructures and their applications in nanotechnology, soft matter and chemical biology.

Liquid-phase electron microscopy is a powerful method for the direct, real-time monitoring of chemical processes on nanometre and micrometre scales. This Review describes the liquid-phase electron-microscopy techniques available to us and their application to studying chemical processes.

Hierarchical self-assembly and crystallization is ubiquitous in nature and is of key importance for creation of complex superstructures. Herein, Yuan and co-workers propose that hierarchically oriented organization guides the formation of such complex systems, especially in supramolecular peptide crystals.

CO₂ reacts with alkanes over heterogeneous catalysts to give CO, H₂O and the corresponding alkene. This Review describes catalytic bimetallics and their oxides, as well as experimental and theoretical studies of their mechanisms.

Metabolic glycoengineering provides a strategy to manipulate glycan structure and function to detect, monitor and treat disease. In this Review, we discuss the chemistry underlying metabolic glycoengineering and highlight recent advances towards the clinical translation of this technology.

Artificial intelligence has recently seen numerous applications in synthetic organic chemistry. Advanced pattern-recognition heuristics may facilitate the access to chemical matter of interest and complement chemical intuition in the near future.

The natural world has long provided inspiration for the production of artificial, adaptive materials. This Review discusses how unravelling the rules of molecular motion has enabled integration of the cooperative, and sometimes synchronized, operation of light-responsive molecular machines, across length scales, into responsive and autonomous matter.

Changes in the stereochemistry of polymer chains result in changes to the mechanical and physical behaviour of the resulting materials. By harnessing synthetic methods to create stereocontrolled polymers, a new parameter can be accessed to control the behaviour of bulk material.

The application of organocatalysis in biology is still in its infancy. In this Review, we evaluate organocatalytic reactions in terms of their applicability in biological settings, including new technologies in chemical biology and biomedicine.

Triboelectric charging is well known to us all and has widespread and important consequences. Nonetheless, its most basic foundations remain poorly understood, and progress is often countered by the emergence of baffling new observations. Recent work shows the difficulty may arise because charging is governed by competing and unstable dynamical processes.

Femtosecond spectroscopy of photosynthetic systems reveals long-lived quantum coherences. This Review focuses on efforts to understand the microscopic origins of these signals and discusses how such coherences may be exploited to probe design principles of photosynthetic light harvesting.

Electrosynthesis is a practical and green route to hydrogen peroxide, and could reduce our dependence on less environmentally friendly oxidants. This Review describes catalyst and reactor designs for highly selective hydrogen peroxide electrosynthesis.

Senescence is a state of permanent cell cycle arrest. This Review highlights the chemical characteristics of senescence and how we can use small molecules to target, detect or eliminate senescent cells, as well as to induce or inhibit senescence.

Natural product biosynthetic pathways are rich in novel enzymology, but identifying the enzymes that perform new transformations remains challenging. This Review describes recently characterized examples of remarkable chemistries catalysed by biosynthetic enzymes and explores the extent of enzymatic novelty that awaits discovery.