Volume 9 Issue 1, January 2026

New-to-nature photometabolisms are highly intriguing for manufacturing but difficult to achieve. Now, Escherichia coli engineering integrates flavin-based photobiocatalysis with natural enzymatic reactions, achieving efficient semi- and complete photobiosynthesis of diverse unnatural products, demonstrating scalable manufacturing in bioreactors.

A cobalt-doped RuO₂ catalyst enables proton-exchange-membrane (PEM) electrolysers to operate on inexpensive reverse-osmosis water for thousands of hours by blocking chloride and cation impurities. Dual interfacial shielding preserves membrane conductivity, suppresses chlorine evolution and minimizes metal dissolution. This strategy lowers capital and operating costs while maintaining high current densities, advancing practical low-purity-water hydrogen production.

The stability of PEM water electrolysers is severely affected by the purity of the water employed. Here a cobalt-doped RuO₂ catalyst is developed to operate with water treated with reverse osmosis, which contains a significant amount of residual ions, achieving a degradation rate of only 10 μV h⁻¹ after 2,000 h of continuous operation at 1 A cm⁻².

Radical ligand transfer is a common reactive pathway in 3d transition metals. Here the authors describe it for 5d transition metals in dinuclear gold complexes, for the formal addition of unactivated C(sp³)–Cl bond in gem-dichloroalkanes and Freon-22 to different kinds of alkenes.

Proton-exchange membrane water electrolysers rely on iridium to catalyse their anodic reaction, and while ruthenium is a less costly alternative due to its similar activity, it is not as stable. Now, a hierarchical machine-learning catalyst discovery workflow, termed mixed acceleration, is put forward to predict catalyst synthesis, activity and stability, and identify promising RuO_x-based water oxidation catalysts.

Insights from surface science studies on model catalysts very often do not translate to practical catalytic systems due to the so-called pressure and materials gaps. Now, a combination of in situ microscopy, spectroscopy and computational modelling is used to bridge the knowledge from surface science and powder catalysts for FeO–Pt during CO oxidation.

Titanosilicates in combination with H₂O₂ catalyse the ammoxidation of cyclohexanone to cyclohexanone oxime, a key Nylon precursor. Integrating a step for the in situ synthesis of H₂O₂ can lead to important efficiency gains but remains challenging. Here the authors report low-loaded subnanometric Pd clusters on titanium mordenite as an efficient catalyst for this transformation.

Light-driven enzymatic catalysis has enabled important abiological transformations in vitro. Now a cellular ene-reductase photoenzyme is integrated with a de novo-designed olefin biosynthetic pathway for photoinduced hydroalkylation, hydroamination and hydrosulfonylation reactions within cells.

The success of photocatalytic coupling of CH₄ has been limited by the low solar absorption of wide-bandgap semiconductors and the uncontrolled oxidation caused by radical oxygen species. Here a Pd/Co₃O₄ heterojunction derived from a metal–organic framework demonstrates the selective conversion of CH₄ to C₂H₆ by less reactive oxygen species under full-solar-spectrum irradiation.

Monitoring charge carrier dynamics and photocatalytic reaction rates in individual photocatalyst particles is a challenging task that can help us to understand structure–reactivity relationships. Here single-molecule fluorescence imaging is coupled with femtosecond interferometric scattering microscopy to investigate these properties in 2D InSe flakes.