News & Views

Clusters of atoms are generally only stable enough to form superatoms when they have filled electron shells, so how can they have magnetic properties?

The covalent bonding behaviour of carbon is the mainstay of organic chemistry, but in some compounds carbon seems to behave more like a metal.

Reducing the manual labour associated with chemical synthesis by using continuous-flow reactors that not only make compounds, but also purify them, opens up new avenues to reaction automation and rapid scale-up.

Chemists are able to synthesize, and deduce the structure of, ever more complex molecules produced by nature, but what does the future hold for this venerable field, and what are the new challenges?

The size and shape of amyloid-β protein assemblies have been studied using electrospray-ionization ion-mobility mass spectrometry, and the protein tetramers and dodecamers have been identified as an important oligomerization state in the development of neurodegenerative disease.

Progress in NMR spectroscopy has been held back by sensitivity issues inherent to the way the measurements are taken. Now, two separate studies show how simple chemical processes can be used to unveil NMR's sensitive side

Exceptional catalysts will be required to produce hydrogen and oxygen from water. Copying multinuclear metal complexes in enzymes is promising, but not the only route. A mononuclear ruthenium complex has been developed that both makes hydrogen and forms oxygen–oxygen bonds through a mechanism different to those in nature.

Cyclic molecules have fascinated chemists for many years and researchers have now made nanoscale macromolecular 'doughnuts' that are large enough to be imaged with an atomic force microscope — providing direct visual proof of their cyclic topologies.

Using the protein of interest as a template, weakly binding ligands can be chemically linked to produce protein-binding agents that can compete with nature's own.

Enhancing the solubility of single-walled carbon nanotubes through non-covalent bonds has led to an improvement in our ability to probe and understand their interactions with electron donors and acceptors.

The formation of robust monolayers of organic molecules on graphene substrates not only sweeps this material's defects under a self-assembled carpet, but may help it achieve its full potential as a building block for molecular electronic devices.

Stretching proteins strung together between the tip of an atomic force microscope and a surface results in mechanical tension that influences the rate at which disulfide bonds are cleaved under basic conditions, and reveals an unexpected switch in reactivity above a certain threshold force.

Cooperative assembly between surfactants and inorganic species is a versatile synthetic route to materials with various nanostructures, and has now been extended to a structure composed of three continuous yet independent networks of mesoporous channels.

Some sequences of DNA conduct charge better than others. Replacing adenine with an analogue allows more sequences to transport charge effectively.

The total synthesis of a bisanthraquinone natural product provides the opportunity to investigate the medicinal properties of a new class of antibiotics.

In a metal complex, a tin ion can be pushed and pulled through a flat macrocyclic ring with a scanning tunnelling microscope, allowing the molecule to act as a switch.

Chemists envy the ease with which some bacterial enzymes can break carbon–hydrogen bonds. They now imitate the enzyme active site in an oxo-bridged diiron compound that can cleave these strong bonds.

Reactants require a certain amount of energy to react — but what kind of energy? Chemical dynamics simulations predict that vibrationally exciting reactants can promote 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reactions by bending them into the correct transition state shape.