News & Views

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.

Energy transfer photocatalysis typically requires expensive metal complexes or specific synthetic photosensitizers with particular triplet energies. Nitroarenes now emerge as powerful, sustainable alternatives, with their catalytic efficiency governed by excited-state geometry rather than only by energy matching, enabling efficient alkene isomerizations and cycloadditions.

Direct conversion of carboxylic acids to nitriles is desirable but thermodynamically uphill. Here, a bioinspired process utilizes magnesium and palladium co-catalysts and urea as a nitrogen source.

Electrocatalytic CO₂ reduction on Cu is typically studied at room temperature and pressure, producing mostly C₁ and C₂ products (short carbon chains). High-temperature experiments above 125 °C now reveal a carbon-chain growth mechanism akin to the thermally driven Fischer–Tropsch reaction, resulting in the production of C₁–C₅ hydrocarbons.

Deuterated compounds find applications in a variety of fields including catalysis optimization, mass spectrometry standards, pharmaceutical development and organic light emitting diodes. A recent study indicates that the choice of deuterium source significantly affects both the outcomes and mechanistic pathways in catalytic cycles.

Bioactive piperidines are among the most common motifs in pharmaceuticals, yet accessing their chiral, highly substituted forms remains challenging. Now, a copper-catalysed reaction of amino-acid-derived cyclopropanols with aldehydes unites catalyst design with the natural chirality of reagents to access a broad family of stereodefined cis-2,6-disubstituted piperidines, expanding opportunities in drug discovery and natural product synthesis.

The rational design of electrocatalysts for hydrogen-involving transformations requires a detailed understanding of surface metal-hydrogen intermediates at the single-site level. Now, single-molecule fluorescence microscopy enables the direct visualization of these intermediates and reveals inter- and intra-particle heterogeneity during the hydrogen evolution reaction on Pd nanocubes.

Engineering protein catalysts represents an attractive approach for enantioselective energy-transfer photochemistry. By combining a genetically encoded photosensitizer in the protein catalyst and a judiciously selected triplet quencher to suppress the racemic background reaction in the solution, photobiocatalytic [2+2] cycloaddition offers improved enantiocontrol in a triplet sensitization catalysis.

Achieving long-term catalyst stability remains a grand challenge in catalysis. A recent study combines neural-network potential-based molecular dynamics simulations with decision tree-based interpretable machine learning, unveiling crucial support properties that guide the rational design of sinter-resistant platinum catalysts.

A study demonstrates that fully synthetic molecules can undergo self-replication, mutation and selection — hallmarks of Darwinian evolution — without relying on DNA or proteins.

Adsorption on solid surfaces is extremely important for various phenomena and applications. In the 1910s, adsorption and subsequent catalysis was described mainly in terms of diffusion through a fluid film to the interface. Langmuir developed the concept of a monolayer adsorption, which became the cornerstone of modern surface science.

The 1913 study ‘Die Kinetik der Invertinwirkung’, by Michaelis and Menten, marked a pivotal advancement in enzymology by illustrating the application of mechanistic models and quantitative kinetics to biocatalysis. The foundational framework described back then continues to have a strong impact on enzymology, with profound influences that range from undergraduate education to structure–function studies and the format and content of contemporary kinetic databases.

Tafel slope analysis, first proposed by Julius Tafel in 1905 and supported by the Butler–Volmer equation, is widely used to elucidate electrocatalytic mechanisms and evaluate kinetics. However, some misuses still frequently occur in the literature, calling for rigorous mechanistic investigations at single-crystal electrodes and under well defined mass-transport conditions.

The evolution of local microenvironments at copper electrodes during the electrochemical CO reduction reaction has long been overlooked. In situ electrochemical surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy now reveals that the dynamic restructuring of interfacial water resulting from increased local alkalinity enhances the acetate selectivity of this reaction.

The radical S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) enzyme, AbmM, catalyses a replacement of the ring oxygen of a sugar with sulfur. However, how this reaction takes place is unknown. Now, an [Fe₄S₄] cluster is shown to have a dual role in catalysis. It functions in the reductive cleavage of SAM and is the donor of the appended sulfur atom.

Coupled electrocatalytic reactions are of great potential for cost-effective co-production of hydrogen and fine chemicals, yet engineering of catalysts, conditions and cell architectures are still key to delivering this technology at scale. Now, a case study shows the efficient production of 2,5-furandicarboxylic acid enabled by a liquid-cooled kilowatt-scale electrolyser.

The reduction of carbon dioxide (CO₂) to value-added products using sunlight is an attractive technology, especially if multi-carbon products are yielded. Now, the efficient photocatalytic conversion of CO₂ to ethylene is demonstrated by filling the pores of a copper-based metal–organic framework with semiconductor nanoparticles.

The enantioselective aldol reaction of glycinates with aldehydes — a direct entry to an important class of noncanonical amino acids — has so far eluded small-molecule catalysis. Now, mimicking the cofactor of threonine aldolase enzymes, a chiral carbonyl catalyst that is remarkably effective for this reaction has been developed. This asymmetric protocol has been successfully applied to more than a thousand aldehyde substrates.

Changing the catalytic metal centre of a non-haem iron dioxygenase to copper results in an enzyme capable of Lewis acid catalysis of new-to-nature enantioselective Conia-ene reactions.