Chemistry articles within Nature Communications

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  • Article |

    Colloidal particles may experience a long-range force because of the confinement of solvent fluctuations. Gnan et al.show numerically that such Casimir-like effect also occurs when colloids are immersed in a chemical sol close to percolation, which provides an alternative way to tune colloidal interactions.

    • Nicoletta Gnan
    • , Emanuela Zaccarelli
    •  & Francesco Sciortino

  • Article |

    The direct detection of metabolites secreted by cells can indicate how cellular dynamics affects population development. Here, the authors present an integrated circuit-based method for electrochemical imaging of redox-active signalling molecules with spatial resolution within bacterial colonies.

    • Daniel L. Bellin
    • , Hassan Sakhtah
    •  & Kenneth L. Shepard

  • Article |

    The design of dynamic covalent bonds is crucial to self-healing polymer materials, but the reaction normally occurs in the presence of heat or/and catalysts. Ying et al.report a catalyst-free design of dynamic urea bonds that are capable of autonomous repairing at low temperature.

    • Hanze Ying
    • , Yanfeng Zhang
    •  & Jianjun Cheng

  • Article |

    Understanding structural transformations of electrodes during cycling is of significance in batteries. Here Ogata et al. develop an approach for probing (de)lithiation processes in nano-silicon by in situNMR spectroscopy, which reveals structural and kinetic insights into the lithium–silicide phase transformations.

    • K. Ogata
    • , E. Salager
    •  & C.P. Grey

  • Article |

    Electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide to more useful products is an industrially important process. Here, the authors report a nanoporous silver catalyst that efficiently and selectively reduces carbon dioxide due to its high surface area and intrinsically high activity.

    • Qi Lu
    • , Jonathan Rosen
    •  & Feng Jiao

  • Article |

    Enzymes have been considered as biocatalysts for organic chemistry, however their broad application has been somewhat hampered by the requirement for reducing cofactors. Here, the authors demonstrate that, in the presence of titania photocatalysts, water can be used as the sacrificial electron donor.

    • Maria Mifsud
    • , Serena Gargiulo
    •  & Avelino Corma

  • Article |

    Office printing is popular around the world, but suffers from the relatively high cost of ink and excessive paper waste. Here the authors demonstrate an eco-friendly dye-impregnated rewritable paper that can be printed using water and erased by heating, thereby allowing simple, repeated recycling.

    • Lan Sheng
    • , Minjie Li
    •  & Sean Xiao-An Zhang

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The crystallization of amorphous calcium carbonate is a widely studied process. Here, the authors probe the mechanism and show that transformation to calcite is preceded by dehydration, even in solution, and that loss of the final water fraction triggers crystallization.

    • Johannes Ihli
    • , Wai Ching Wong
    •  & Fiona C. Meldrum

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Supramolecular self-assembly is a fundamentally important process in fields ranging from structural biology to materials chemistry. Here, the authors report the supramolecular assembly of complex nanostructures from simple nucleosides, and probe the formation process using various in situtechniques.

    • Hang Zhao
    • , Xiurong Guo
    •  & Qianming Chen

  • Article |

    There is interest in hexagonal boron nitride and hexagonal boron carbonitride in electronics applications, but synthesizing them with high quality is challenging. Here, chemical vapour deposition graphene was chemically converted to hexagonal boron nitride and hexagonal boron carbonitride with both high on-off ratios and mobilities.

    • Yongji Gong
    • , Gang Shi
    •  & Pulickel M. Ajayan

  • Article |

    Isotopic substitution alters the optoelectronic properties of conducting polymers, but a microscopic understanding is still missing. Shao et al.address this effect using a series of polymer isotopes that are synthesized with deuterium atoms substituted either on their backbone or side chains.

    • Ming Shao
    • , Jong Keum
    •  & Kai Xiao

  • Article |

    Mesocrystals are periodic arrangements of nanoparticles that allow for a tuning of the superstructure properties via its constituents. Here Bian et al. combine the properties of different nanocrystalline materials and fabricate a superstructure of two metal oxides with n- and p-type polarity.

    • Zhenfeng Bian
    • , Takashi Tachikawa
    •  & Tetsuro Majima

  • Article |

    Incomplete oxidation of fuels is a common problem in enzymatic fuel cells and it leads to low energy densities. Zhu et al. report the complete oxidation of sugar in an enzymatic fuel cell through a synthetic enzymatic pathway, which exhibits higher energy densities than lithium-ion batteries.

    • Zhiguang Zhu
    • , Tsz Kin Tam
    •  & Y. -H. Percival Zhang

  • Article |

    A wide diversity of surfaces patterned with microfibres is highly desirable for various applications as electrode materials. Demortière et al.develop a facile approach of producing polymer microfibres with controlled architectures via dynamic self-assembly under an alternating electric field.

    • Arnaud Demortière
    • , Alexey Snezhko
    •  & Igor S. Aranson

  • Article |

    The ability to easily modulate a material’s photoluminescent properties in response to stimuli is difficult to achieve in liquid crystals. Here the authors report ionic liquid crystals exhibiting high fluorescent quantum yields with redox-dependent photoluminescence.

    • Amerigo Beneduci
    • , Sante Cospito
    •  & Giuseppe Chidichimo

  • Article |

    Operation of lithium–sulphur batteries suffers from uncontrolled lithium polysulphide formation and corrosion at the anode. Huang et al.design an integrated anode structure composed of electrically connected graphite and lithium metal, which alleviates the problems and leads to high battery performance.

    • Cheng Huang
    • , Jie Xiao
    •  & Jun Liu

  • Article
    | Open Access

    The stability of the benzene molecule reduces its tendency to react in ways that perturb the aromaticity—for example, in Diels–Alder reactions. Here the authors report a diene capable of not only inducing benzene to react under mild conditions but also of breaking apart the ring system itself.

    • Yusuke Inagaki
    • , Masaaki Nakamoto
    •  & Akira Sekiguchi

  • Article |

    Battery technologies are promising for grid-scale applications, but existing batteries in general operate at low rates, have limited cycle life and are expensive. Pasta et al. develop a grid-scale battery based on Prussian Blue electrodes, which shows potential in overcoming these problems.

    • Mauro Pasta
    • , Colin D. Wessells
    •  & Yi Cui

  • Article |

    Molybdenum disulphide may be prepared by lithiation and exfoliation; however the process requires a long lithiation and produces low yields. Here, the authors show that metal naphthalenides may be used for the intercalation, and that the resulting products are of high quality and may be inkjet-printed.

    • Jian Zheng
    • , Han Zhang
    •  & Kian Ping Loh

  • Article |

    Capacity degradation over extended cycles is a major problem in lithium-sulphur batteries. Here, Su et al.report a charge operation control strategy to inhibit dissolution of polysulphides leading to enhanced capacity retention over multiple cycles.

    • Yu-Sheng Su
    • , Yongzhu Fu
    •  & Arumugam Manthiram

  • Article |

    Mesoporous oxides are important materials with a range of tunable structural properties. Here, the authors report a general, inverse micelle-based method to produce crystalline mesoporous materials with monomodal pore sizes from a range of elements.

    • Altug S. Poyraz
    • , Chung-Hao Kuo
    •  & Steven L. Suib

  • Article |

    Typically dispersion forces are weak interactions, and host–guest chemistry is dominated by more powerful events such as hydrogen bonding. Here, the authors show extremely high binding between a modified marine peptide and chloroform, driven by dispersion interactions with the chlorine atoms.

    • Gebhard Haberhauer
    • , Áron Pintér
    •  & Sascha Woitschetzki

  • Article |

    Efficient and pathogen-specific antifungal agents are required to mitigate drug resistance problems. Here the authors present a series of cationic small molecules, which are easy to isolate and characterize, and which can self-assemble to give polymer-like antifungal activity and specificity.

    • Kazuki Fukushima
    • , Shaoqiong Liu
    •  & James L. Hedrick

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Mid-infrared spectroscopy offers important chemical and structural information about biological samples but diffraction prevents nanoscale studies. Amenabar et al.demonstrate Fourier transform infrared nanospectroscopy for analysing the secondary structure of protein complexes with 30 nm spatial resolution.

    • Iban Amenabar
    • , Simon Poly
    •  & Rainer Hillenbrand

  • Article |

    The efficient catalysis of the electrochemical reduction of carbon dioxide is an important industrial process, usually performed by noble metal catalysts. Here the authors report a metal-free carbon nanofibre-based catalyst operating with a negligible overpotential, high current density and long-term stability.

    • Bijandra Kumar
    • , Mohammad Asadi
    •  & Amin Salehi-Khojin

  • Article |

    Spin-crossover complexes and single-chain magnets exhibit magnetic bistability and may be used in information storage applications. Here, the authors present a one-dimensional spin-crossover complex wherein the single-chain magnet behaviour is actuated by light-induced excited spin-state trapping.

    • Tao Liu
    • , Hui Zheng
    •  & Chunying Duan

  • Article |

    The absorption of mid-infrared light by organic molecules is used for diagnostics and sensing purposes. Here Zamadar et al.find that mid-infrared molar absorption coefficients of conjugated molecules bearing charges, owing to polaron vibrations, are often more than one hundred times larger than those of comparable neutral molecules.

    • Matibur Zamadar
    • , Sadayuki Asaoka
    •  & John R. Miller

  • Article |

    Microbial fuels cells present a way of generating electricity using the natural metabolism of microorganisms. Here the authors carry out single-cell current measurements ofGeobacter sulfurreducensDL-1 to determine the upper limits of microbial fuel cell performance.

    • Xiaocheng Jiang
    • , Jinsong Hu
    •  & Justin C. Biffinger

  • Article |

    Solid contacts on a microscopic level are widely described by a classical contact mechanics theory. Here Styleet al.show that this theory breaks down when a small particle adheres to a soft surface where a fluid-like behaviour is observed because of the predominant role played by surface tension.

    • Robert W. Style
    • , Callen Hyland
    •  & Eric R. Dufresne

  • Article |

    Biomineralization processes have inspired the design of synthetic silica structures in vitro. Here, the authors use a living diatom to fabricate organo-silica constructs and are able to incorporate thiol moieties into the diatom frustule without the loss of nano-scale architectural features.

    • Yvonne Lang
    • , Francisco del Monte
    •  & Abhay Pandit

  • Article |

    Molecularly interconnected networks are the building blocks for molecular circuits in nanoelectronic devices, but a mass production with tunable properties is difficult. Escárcega–Bobadilla et al.develop an approach to form interconnected self-assembled nano-rings, which resemble a network of neurons.

    • Martha V. Escárcega-Bobadilla
    • , Gustavo A. Zelada-Guillén
    •  & Arjan W. Kleij

  • Article
    | Open Access

    Two-photon-pumped dye lasers are useful for applications such as biological imaging; however, loss processes reduce their efficiency. Here, metal-organic frameworks, into which the laser dye is incorporated, demonstrate enhanced laser operation because losses such as dye aggregation-caused quenching are reduced.

    • Jiancan Yu
    • , Yuanjing Cui
    •  & Guodong Qian

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