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Enzymes keep their catalytic reactivity under fine control, letting appropriate molecules approach their active sites to perform reactions. Now, studies of calixarenes attached to gold clusters to emulate this behaviour in synthetic systems suggest that the key to accessibility could be a matter of the relative sizes of ligands and metal clusters.
The efficient catalytic oxidation of water to dioxygen in the solid state is one of the challenges to be overcome to build sun-driven and/or electrocatalytic water-splitting devices. Now, an effective water-oxidation hybrid catalyst system has been made by attaching a ruthenium-polyoxometallate complex to a carbon nanotube.
Identifying the genes responsible for each step of a natural product biosynthesis has allowed the synthesis to be 'hijacked' to make bioactive compounds, and reveals that some suspected transporter enzymes could have other important roles in fungal defence systems.
Taking inspiration from a proposed biosynthetic sequence, a cascade of simple reactions leads to an efficient synthesis of the alkaloid natural product (+)-fastigiatine.
The efficiency of photovoltaic materials is compromised by their inability to capture all the energy absorbed when excited by high-energy photons. Such absorption creates 'hot' electrons, and now their transfer from excited lead selenide nanocrystals to an electron acceptor provides a necessary initial step towards tapping their 'lost' energy.
A series of scanning probe microscopy experiments combined with density functional theory calculations have now been used to unambiguously determine the structure of a marine natural product. Can this method become generally useful for the determination of the structure of natural products?
Most synthetic polymers are made from petroleum and their production is currently not sustainable. RAFT polymerization has emerged as a powerful technique to control the synthesis of such polymers, thus expanding further their applications. This Review discusses the sustainability of RAFT in terms of process and materials.
The oxygen-evolving centre in the protein complex photosystem II involves Ca2+ within a high-valent oxomanganese cluster, but the role of Ca2+ has yet to be clarified. Interestingly, the electron-transfer behaviour of a non-haem oxoiron(IV) complex has now been found to be significantly altered by Lewis acid metal-ion binding to the oxo atom.
A highly basic gold catalyst has been shown to mediate the reaction of aromatic C–H bonds with carbon dioxide. The reaction provides a potential method of fixing atmospheric carbon dioxide and producing valuable chemical products.
The aggregation of proteins into fibrils plays a crucial role in neurological conditions such as Parkinson's disease. Further insight into fibril formation has now been gained that reveals the effect of hydrophobic surfaces, including air.
Aerosol particles are crucially important to the chemistry of the atmosphere, influencing both climate and air quality. This Review discusses progress in understanding the radical-initiated heterogeneous oxidation of atmospheric aerosols, focusing on the reaction mechanisms and kinetics, and also their effects on the physico-chemical properties of particles.
Electron transfer between ions and water is of fundamental interest for many processes in biology and chemistry. Now, using core-electron excitation of hydrated iron cations, ultrafast electron transfer to the coordinating water molecules has been detected.
Proteins are most at home in water, although it has been known for some time that they can remain functional in non-aqueous environments. Researchers have now shown that in solvent-free melts, the oxygen-binding protein myoglobin adopts a near-native structure and retains its biological activity.
Pattern mapping is a synthetic tactic that is complementary to standard retrosynthetic analysis. When combined with the concept of traceless stereochemical guidance, it leads to an efficient synthesis of the steroidal natural product (±)-aplykurodinone-1.
A versatile intermediate has been shown to provide access to a wide variety of compounds in the cortistatin family. This approach offers the most efficient total synthesis of the cortistatins reported so far.
The concept of encoding information into a synthetic polymer through its monomer sequence promises very-high-density storage, but decoding such data is a significant challenge. Now, it has been shown that small molecular tweezers can recognize different triplet sequences in oligoimides, offering a glimpse of how to read out information from polymer codes.
