Volume 4 Issue 5, May 2020

An autobiography by Martin Karplus, from his childhood and continuing right through to a journey to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize.

Ethylene is a plant hormone that has proved difficult to measure. A new catalytic chemiresistor senses ethylene in the parts per billion regime and can monitor plant senescence.

Machine learning approaches that attempt to predict the outcome of organic reactions are often complex or highly specialized. A new approach requires the molecular structure of reactants as the only input to predict products, enantioselectivities and yields.

Anions can act as efficient templates for the formation of macrocyclic peptides.

Sialic acids are a heterogeneous group of monosaccharides that play key roles in human glycobiology. This Review describes derivatization strategies that allow the straightforward analysis of sialic acid linkage isomers by mass spectrometry and exemplifies their use for biological samples.

Properties of nanomaterials respond to changes in the material’s phase, as well as changes in size, composition and morphology. This Review discusses the most recent developments in phase engineering of nanomaterials to afford conventional and unconventional crystal phases, amorphous phases and amorphous–crystalline heterophases.

High-resolution mass spectrometry has unrivalled power to analyse individual components of ensembles, rather than ensembles as a whole. This Perspective describes recent advances in the mass spectrometry of synthetic polymers, as well as the limitations of present methods and possible strategies to overcome them.