Articles in 2011

The self-assembly of monometallic moieties with organic ligands has proved to be a highly versatile approach for preparing a range of metal–ligand assemblies that are helical, optically pure and stable in aqueous solutions. One such iron(II) ‘flexicate’ system exhibits significant interactions with DNA, as well as promising antimicrobial activity properties.

Thermodynamic measurements show that the most stable structural form of a number of proteins under cellular conditions is fibrillar, implying that their functional states may only be metastable.

Mutating RNA one nucleotide at a time and measuring the impact of this on its chemical reactivity provides a strategy for determining its three-dimensional structure, and from there, hopefully, its function.

Michelle Francl wonders how much time chemists should spend learning history.

Cross-coupling between a racemic secondary alkyl halide and an alkyl borane to produce an enantioenriched alkyl–alkyl product is one of the final substrate combinations to succumb to the synthetically powerful Suzuki–Miyaura methodology.

Autonomous propulsion of microparticles using catalytic olefin polymerization, and directional rotation of a molecule on a metal surface using electrons from the tip of a scanning tunnelling microscope.

To join in with the International Year of Chemistry celebrations, we launched a competition earlier this year inviting aspiring science communicators to write an essay about one of seven elements.

The scope of dynamic combinatorial chemistry is somewhat limited by the small number of predictably reversible reactions. Now, secondary alcohols are shown to quickly and reversibly react with iminium ions to form hemiaminal ethers, opening up opportunites for their use in the construction of complex — and functional — dynamic architectures.

Sodium, ubiquitous on Earth in living organisms, oceans and minerals — all the way to table salt — may seem like one of the more ordinary elements. Margit S. Müller highlights why we, like the fairytale king, should not take it for granted.

Assembling random networks on a surface is an intriguing — and potentially useful — phenomenon, but partial order is difficult to control. Researchers have now altered two-dimensional tetracarboxylic acid networks through only small chemical changes. This phase behaviour reveals that entropy, alongside energy, plays a crucial role in the order–disorder balance.

‘Roaming’ is a recently discovered reaction dynamics phenomenon in which a molecule undergoes frustrated dissociation to radicals, followed by an intramolecular abstraction reaction. An imaging study, with associated high-level ab initio calculations, has now shown that ‘roaming-mediated isomerization’ plays a key role in the photodissociation of nitrobenzene.

The design and synthesis of a family of chiral and conformationally constrained oligomers is described. Asymmetric synthesis of the monomers is presented and the preparation of a 160,000-member library of diverse tetramers via split-and-pool methods is discussed. From this library, a non-covalent ligand to the DNA-binding domain of p53 was discovered.

Despite their potential roles in catalysis and materials science, the redox-induced dynamic structural changes in (sp²-carbon ligand)–(multiple metals)–(sp²-carbon ligand) systems are not well understood. Now, tetra-palladium sandwich complexes have been described that exhibit redox-switchable assembly of the metal centres or coupling of the ligands.