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Cooperative assembly between surfactants and inorganic species is a versatile synthetic route to materials with various nanostructures, and has now been extended to a structure composed of three continuous yet independent networks of mesoporous channels.
The total synthesis of a bisanthraquinone natural product provides the opportunity to investigate the medicinal properties of a new class of antibiotics.
In a metal complex, a tin ion can be pushed and pulled through a flat macrocyclic ring with a scanning tunnelling microscope, allowing the molecule to act as a switch.
Chemists envy the ease with which some bacterial enzymes can break carbon–hydrogen bonds. They now imitate the enzyme active site in an oxo-bridged diiron compound that can cleave these strong bonds.
Reactants require a certain amount of energy to react — but what kind of energy? Chemical dynamics simulations predict that vibrationally exciting reactants can promote 1,3-dipolar cycloaddition reactions by bending them into the correct transition state shape.
Molecules with a Möbius geometry are not found in nature, and have thus been a target for synthetic chemists since the first prediction of its existence in 1964. This review summarizes recent successes in synthesizing these fascinating forms, with particular emphasis on expanded porphyrins.
Latent catalysts require activation, and this is often achieved with either heat, light or an additional chemical agent. By attaching polymer chains to known classes of metal–carbene complexes, it has now been shown that mechanical force can also be used to induce catalytic activity.
A terminal uranium–carbon multiple bond has long been sought-after in actinide chemistry. Now, a complex featuring a dianionic carbon atom as part of a multidentate ligand brings actinide carbenes a little nearer.
Adding polyoxometallate crystals to a solution of organic cations leads to the controllable growth of hollow microtubes that may ultimately prove useful for applications ranging from microfluidics to medicine.
A drying procedure using supercritical carbon dioxide gives greater access to the pores of metal–organic frameworks, affording larger surface areas for applications.
The timescale on which the hydrogen bonds formed by a water molecule in a salt solution switch between ions and other water molecules is revealed for the first time.
The vast number of known organic compounds and the reactions that connect them together can be thought of as a complex network. Analysing the organic chemistry universe in this manner may prove useful for both fundamental and practical purposes, such as predicting chemical reactivity or improving how regulated substances are monitored.
Advances in computational methods have enabled the trends in reactivity for transition metal and alloy catalysts to be described theoretically. This review discusses some of the first examples of how such knowledge can be used to design solid catalysts.
Hydrogen-bonded dimers of one and two base-pair nucleotides can be stabilized inside the hydrophobic pocket provided by self-assembled molecular cages. The results could bring DNA-based computing a step closer to reality.
