News & Comment

A rearrangement reaction — a classic of traditional organic synthesis — has been applied to a polymer, enabling conversion of a polyester to a vinyl polymer.

Cyanuric acid (CA) derivatives can co-assemble with polyadenine sequences to form a triple helical DNA-based structure bearing functional groups able to guide higher ordered architectures.

Using ammonium bicarbonate as an additive can boost the reactivity of amines with carbon dioxide in microdroplet reactions.

Climate change is a chemical problem and chemistry and chemical engineering can provide some of the solutions. What kind of chemistry should we be doing?

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a dramatic impact on the way we do research. Here, I share an approach to rebuild research capacity in a new collaborative fashion termed ‘teamlets’. Teamlets enable a team-based approach to boost morale, increase data integrity, faciliate interdisciplinarity and ensure continuity of expertise.

Rapidly alternating the polarity of electrodes offers a new opportunity for synthetic chemists to obtain selective reaction outcomes in organic electrosynthesis.

A silicon-linker that tethers a diyne and a diynophile provides new mechanistic insight and control of hexadehydro-Diels–Alder (HDDA) reactions.

Synthetic siderophore-antibiotic conjugates can afford promising antibiotic profiles against ESKAPE pathogens and unique resistant mechanisms.

The combination of mass spectroscopy-based proteomics with molecular dynamics enables the in-depth study of metallothioneine-Zn(II) binding mechanisms, critical to cell homeostasis and Zn(II) ion buffering.

A geometrically constrained phosphine bearing a tridentate NNS pincer ligand can afford thermoneutral activation of N−H in ammonia.

The kinetics of proton-coupled electron transfer during electrocatalytic oxygen reduction are optimized when hydrogen bonding between reaction intermediates and ionic liquids coating the catalyst is maximized.

Hydrogen-bonded organic frameworks can be employed to encapsulate protein therapeutics for enhanced cell uptake and intracellular biocatalysis.

Homochiral porous cage-in-cage structures that self-assemble from lanthanide cations and chiral amino acid-derived ligands have been prepared and shown to be highly effective in enantioselective separations of small-molecule guests.

The supramolecular assembly of oligomers encoded with complementary recognition units enables duplex hybridization with helical structure.

Selective cross-coupling at either of two similar halide substituents in a dihalogenated substrate can be achieved by controlling the speciation of the active palladium catalyst.

It has so far proved difficult to characterize halogen bonds in solution. A new and simple approach is to use scalar coupling between atoms in a halogen bond donor as a measure of bond strengths with diverse acceptors.

Cementitious materials — not least their reinforcements — are prone to aerobic oxidation, followed by chloride and sulfate attack. These processes jeopardize structures, particularly those exposed to air and seawater.

Locally activating prodrugs through targeted irradiation — a new concept for concurrent chemotherapy and radiotherapy.

The Fenton and Fenton-like reactions feature in oxidative stress and are central to advanced oxidation technologies to remediate organic pollutants. The reactions are often simplistically taught to afford only hydroxyl radical as the active oxidant. Yet, this is just one of many possible oxidants and is probably not the major oxidant formed under biological conditions.

A polymer coating made from cosmetics-based ingredients can be applied to diverse surfaces to capture airborne droplets and mitigate the transmission of infectious respiratory diseases.