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The light-driven conversion of abundant resources such as CO2 and H2O into chemical fuels for energy storage is crucial to end our dependence on fossil fuels. This Review highlights how molecular catalysts and photosensitizers can be grafted onto metal–organic frameworks to combine the advantages of both classes of compounds. Different synthetic strategies are discussed, along with their advantages and limitations.
Chemically fuelled synthetic molecular machines are capable of driving and sustaining non-equilibrium motion, analogous to the biomachinery that underpins life. This Review discusses the chemical and physical features of biological and synthetic chemical fuels and highlights potential challenges and opportunities for the development of synthetic chemically fuelled machinery.
The emerging field of dissipative DNA nanotechnology aims at developing synthetic devices and nanomaterials with life-like properties such as directional motion, transport, communication or adaptation. This Review surveys how dissipative DNA systems combine the programmability of nucleic-acid reactions with the consumption of energy stored in chemical fuel molecules to perform work and cyclical tasks.
Enzymes, either purified or as whole-cell biocatalysts, can be concatenated into catalytic cascades and used to produce pharmaceutically relevant molecules. This Review discusses the advantages and requirements of multistep enzyme cascades and also highlights how they can be harnessed to achieve highly sustainable and cost-efficient syntheses.
Viruses use the cellular machinery of their host organism to reproduce. This Review discusses how [FeS] cluster-containing proteins activate, support and modulate the innate immune response to restrict viral infections as well as highlighting how some of these proteins simultaneously support the replication of viruses.
