Review Articles in 2025

Laser technology offers high energy, precise spatial resolution and seamless automation for materials synthesis and device fabrication. This Review highlights laser-assisted materials engineering at the atomic and nanoscales and examines the laser-assisted discovery of materials with interesting properties and applications.

Inspired by nature’s spatially organized catalytic systems, multiscale confinement emerges as a powerful strategy for programmable biocatalysis. This Review highlights recent advances in designing artificial enzymes, enzyme immobilization methods and substrate channelling techniques, discussing current challenges and future directions towards efficient, sustainable enzyme catalysis for organic synthesis.

Thianthrene, long used in materials science, has recently emerged as a powerful reagent in organic synthesis. Its unique electronic structure enables access to diverse aryl, alkenyl and alkyl thianthrenium salts, which exhibit reactivity beyond conventional (pseudo)halides. This Review highlights the fundamental properties, distinctive reactivity and synthetic applications of these thianthrenium salts.

Three-component, iron-based catalytic transformations offer a promising and sustainable approach to building complex molecules in a single step. This Review highlights advances and ongoing challenges in the development of iron-catalysed difunctionalization of alkenes. Mechanistic insights that enhance our understanding and guide the development of new transformations are discussed.

One-carbon compounds, including carbon dioxide and methane, represent a sustainable resource for chemical conversions. This Review highlights recent advances in the biochemical upgrading of one-carbon substrates to value-added products using a combination of cellular, cell-free and abiotic catalysis strategies.

Synthetic molecular systems exhibiting allosteric regulation are used in purification, sensing, delivery and catalysis. Metal–organic cages provide a versatile platform for allosteric regulation due to their structural diversity and tunable cavities. This Review discusses recent advances in allosteric regulation with metal–organic cages, emphasizing design principles, applications and future challenges.

Although π-bonds are typically associated with having well-defined arrangements of atoms, ring constraints can lead to geometric distortion, resulting in heightened reactivity. These effects can be leveraged to enable synthetic transformations. This Review features processes wherein geometric distortion is leveraged to provide rapid access to structurally complex products.

CO₂ hydrogenation is promising for the conversion of waste CO₂ emissions into value-added chemicals. This Review examines the atomic-level design of heterogeneous catalysts with precise active sites and related catalytic reaction engineering for tuning CO₂ hydrogenation selectivity.

Well-defined vinyl polymers with ultrahigh molecular weights are promising for use as high-performance materials and are now made increasingly accessible by photocontrolled radical polymerizations. This Review discusses the methods developed for the synthesis of such polymers and their potential applications.