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.
Careful consideration of thermodynamics has allowed the design of nucleic acid probes that are highly specific and virtually unaffected by changes in reaction conditions.
Determining molecular bond orders can be a delicate and sophisticated task, especially if the electronic structure of the studied system is complex. Now, two different ab initio methods have revealed that C2 and analogous species have a fourth bond, rather than the previously assumed maximum of three.
How do you create a molecular circuit board? Covalently coupling different molecules in a sequential manner in surface-based nanostructures opens up new possibilities and hopes for molecular electronics.
A sophisticated palladium(IV)-based species allows nucleophilic fluoride to react as an electrophilic fluorination reagent. This long-awaited reactivity will be especially useful in the preparation of radiochemically labelled molecules for positron emission tomography studies.
The handedness of supramolecular helices formed from achiral monomers has been controlled by applying rotational and gravitational forces, but at the start of the assembly process only. This demonstrates that a falsely chiral influence is able to induce absolute enantioselection.
Ultrafast chemical physics follows in the explosive wake of technological innovation, using light and radiation sources to study phenomena at timescales where the boundaries between physics and chemistry dissolve. UCP 2011, the second meeting in a series, explored the current state of the art in ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy.
Metamaterials are synthetic materials tailored with unusual properties that are not found in nature. It has now been predicted that they could be engineered with negative refractive index through the use of periodic structures via bottom-up self-assembly synthesis.
This Perspective discusses contemporary ideas for enzymatic reactions that invoke a role for fast 'promoting' (or 'compressive') motions or vibrations that, in principle, can facilitate enzyme-catalysed reactions. With an emphasis on hydrogen-transfer reactions, experimental, theoretical and computational approaches that have lent evidence to this controversial hypothesis are discussed.
Enzyme-catalysed reactions can involve significant quantum tunnelling and show kinetic isotope effects with complex temperature dependences. In this Perspective, reaction dynamics and enzyme catalysis are linked to transition-state-theory frameworks. It is shown that a multi-state model using standard transition-state theory can account for complex experimental data without invoking a role for enzyme dynamics.
The action of ultrasound on mechanically responsive functional groups — so-called mechanophores — embedded in a polymer chain often permits unusual chemical transformations. There is now a systematic effort to quantify the reactivity of mechanophores in relation to their structure.
Valuable insight into the use of lasers to control electron dynamics can be gained by simulations, but these are often limited by the uncertainty in the model systems used. Now, accurate calculations of controlled electron motion in benzene improve on this, while showing that its aromaticity could potentially be 'switched off'.
The design of a small-molecule library for drug discovery attempts to combine the favourable diversity of natural product structures with the modularity of peptide synthesis.
Stacking of a chromophoric molecule in the solid state has been altered rationally by the formation of co-crystals, allowing fine control of luminescence.
Two separate studies show how DNA tiles can be used in automated assembly processes: one system self-replicates, the second assembles the output of a molecular computation.
A reversible covalent reaction in which two oxygen-insensitive radicals combine to form a carbon–carbon bond provides the mechanism by which a polymer gel can self-heal at room temperature without the need for any external stimulus.
The chemical introduction of a photoswitchable ligand into ion channel structures should make it possible to study the diverse roles of neurotransmitters and receptors in the brain.
