Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain
the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in
Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles
and JavaScript.
Enantioselective aldol reactions with fluoroacetate would enable access to numerous fluorinated analogues of therapeutically important compounds but have been a long-standing unsolved challenge. Now, bioinspired fluoromalonic acid half thioesters (F-MAHTs) have been devised and allow for highly stereoselective reactions with aldehydes under mild organocatalytic conditions.
Preorganization of catalysts and substrates can lead to significant rate enhancement—an effect often observed in enzyme catalysis. Now, a self-assembled nanosphere equipped with 24 guanidinium binding sites is demonstrated to strongly bind sulfonate-containing gold catalysts. Base-triggered co-encapsulation of carboxylate containing substrates leads to pronounced gating effects and dramatically enhanced reaction rates.
Highly compressible crystalline materials typically rely on the high compressibility of their chemical bonds. Now, a family of LnFe(CN)6 frameworks (Ln = Ho, Lu or Y) has been shown to exhibit pronounced volumetric and linear compressibilities through a spring-and-gear mechanism instead, in which a torsionally flexible LnN6 unit twists reversibly under pressure.
Metal centres play an important role in the damage to biomolecules caused by radiation, but the respective microscopic mechanisms are unknown. Now it is shown that the absorption of X-rays by a metal ion leads to an intricate chain of ultrafast relaxation steps that results in the complete degradation of the metal's local environment.
Antibody–drug conjugates have shown considerable promise for treating disease. However, in order to deliver their full potential, sophisticated site-specific conjugation technologies are needed. This Perspective provides an overview of the different methods used for the site-specific attachment of cytotoxic agents to antibodies.
Self-replicating molecules provide a simple molecular level system to study the processes occurring in speciation. Now it is shown that in a pool of interconverting macrocycles, constructed from two building blocks, two distinct sets of self-replicating molecules emerge, and that one is a descendant of the other.
Until recently, the three-body recombination reaction was widely regarded as the only reaction pathway to the production of molecular oxygen in Earth's prebiotic primitive atmosphere. Observation of a CO2 photodissociation pathway altered this view, but now, using anion velocity imaging, a further source of molecular oxygen is revealed, formed via the dissociative electron attachment to CO2.
DNA nanostructures are typically used as molecular scaffolds. Now, it has been shown that they can also act as reusable templates for ‘molecular printing’ of DNA strands onto gold nanoparticles. The products inherit the recognition elements of the parent template: number, orientation and sequence asymmetry of DNA strands. This converts isotropic nanoparticles into complex building blocks.
Single operation transformations that enantioselectively install a stereogenic centre while introducing a distal functional group are synthetically valuable but rare processes. Now, a copper-catalysed reductive relay hydroamination process that simultaneously creates a remote chiral centre is described. The resulting γ- and δ-chiral amines are important structural elements in many pharmaceutical agents and natural products.
