Research Briefing

A multimodal imaging approach is developed to interrogate microorganism–semiconductor biohybrids at the single-cell and single-molecule level for light-driven CO₂ fixation. Application to lithoautotrophic bacterium Ralstonia eutropha biohybrids reveals the roles of two hydrogenases in electron transport and bioplastic formation, the magnitude of semiconductor-to-single-cell electron transport and the associated pathways.

Despite advances, understanding of the quantum state-to-state scattering dynamics between charged ions and neutral molecules at low collision energies remains limited. A high-resolution crossed-beam experiment with quantum state-selected ions prepared by laser photoionization and supporting trajectory surface-hopping calculations now provides insight into the quantum state-to-state collisional dynamics of a model charge-transfer reaction.

Challenges in the synthesis of heparan sulfate (HS) glycosaminoglycans have limited access to defined HS oligosaccharides bearing a diverse array of sulfation sequences. A concise, divergent synthetic approach now provides a library of 64 HS tetrasaccharides displaying a comprehensive set of sulfation sequences, offering insight into the elusive sulfation code of glycosaminoglycans.

Protein translation is the ultimate paradigm for sequence-defined polymer synthesis. To introduce non-canonical monomers into the genetic code of living organisms, pairs of biomolecules known as aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases (aaRSs) and transfer RNAs (tRNAs) are required. The discovery and engineering of five such pairs, that do not interfere with each other or the aaRS–tRNA pairs of a bacterial host, sets the stage for highly modified genetically encoded biopolymers.

Low-coordinate lanthanide complexes with strong magnetic anisotropy could afford high-performance single-molecule magnets (SMMs) but are challenging to synthesize. Now, through ligand design, a near-linear pseudo-two-coordinate Yb(iii) complex that exhibits slow magnetic relaxation is reported. The complex has a large total splitting of the ground-state manifold, arising from the crystal field imposed by the ligands.

Colloidal clathrate crystals self-assembled from hard polyhedral shapes in computer simulations are stabilized by entropy compartmentalization, whereby hosts and guests contribute unequally to the entropy. This creative solution to satisfying the laws of thermodynamics suggests new ways to make colloidal crystals with open cages and hierarchical host–guest structures.

Catenanes that are chiral owing to the relative orientation of their rings have always been referred to as ‘topologically chiral’. It is now shown that although in specific cases the stereochemistry is a topological property of the structure, the underlying stereogenic unit itself is not inherently topological in nature.

Serial rotation electron diffraction (SerialRED) enables rapid and reliable phase analysis and structure determination of complex polycrystalline materials that cannot be routinely characterized using X-ray diffraction. Five zeolite phases were identified in a single synthesis product by automated screening of hundreds of crystals, demonstrating the power of SerialRED for materials development.

Nanomachines are central to life and are becoming an important part of self-regulated nanotechnologies. Inspired by natural self-assembled nanosystems, it has been shown that artificial nanosystems can evolve and adopt regulatory functions upon fragmentation of their structures into multiple components that reassemble to form the same nanostructure.