Monthly peer-reviewed journal published by Nature Portfolio covering research across the chemical sciences.
Nature reports that ring puckering in thiazolidine-2-thione ligands steers Au4 nanoclusters into left- or right-handed triple helices. The authors present the collagen-inspired result as a transferable route to programming helicity in metal nanoclusters.
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Authors of a Nature paper describe a molecule that rotates in one direction by passing orbital angular momentum through helical orbitals to a rotor. Feringa-type motors need a steric barrier and an excited transitional state; this design needs neither, according to the abstract.
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Physicists merging two ammonia beams measured state-to-state collisions down to 0.3 cm-1 and found dipole-dipole interactions switching off at low energy. The classical capture model the field uses predicts steady growth as energy falls, so the measured peak gives low-energy theory a concrete test.
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Researchers engineered Escherichia coli with up to 15 nitroreductase gene deletions that let the cells retain nitroaromatic compounds normal strains destroy. Industry makes these chemicals with nitric acid under heat and hazard that a cell-based route avoids.
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A team reporting in Nature Chemistry cross-coupled carboxylic and boronic acids using polarity-flipping electrolysis to form saturated carbon-carbon bonds. It directly joins two short-lived radicals that had resisted coupling.
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F. Chen and colleagues made Imma-B60, an open-framework boron allotrope with high electrical conductivity and plasticity, by degassing a precursor. Nature Chemistry's briefing says the pairing could widen boron's uses beyond its superhard and semiconducting phases.
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Chemists have crystallised a uranium Fischer-type carbyne with a uranium-carbon distance of 2.379 angstroms, a bond long sought in f-element chemistry. Their analysis finds bonding related to, but distinct from, that of the transition-metal carbynes known since 1973.
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Chemists baked the sodium out of sodium boride to make Imma-B60, a porous boron that conducts about 10 million times better than the common form. Its flexibility figure is shakier, given in the same report as both 23% and 32% strain, the higher from compressing nanopillars.
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Peng and colleagues coordinate BH3 to an aziridine nitrogen, convert the adduct into a boryl radical, and let it fragment into a beta-aminoalkyl radical that copper and nickel catalysis can then couple to aryl and other partners.
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A redox-inactive zinc series isolates what appended aniline donors do to nitrate binding, and swapping in iron turns that binding into catalytic deoxygenation, giving NO under heat and ammonia under light.
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By engineering hydrogen-bond donors into the shell around an iron complex, a University of Michigan group forced the stable pollutant to react, using heat to make nitric oxide and light to make ammonia.
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The cycle turns on a five-membered cyclic phosphate that hydrolyses far faster than the ordinary kind. That speed is what lets a carbodiimide fuel push a phosphate from one hydroxyl foothold to the next, with no enzyme present.
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Varinder Aggarwal's group at Bristol used a photocatalyst and a swappable group on nitrogen to turn simple 1,5-dienes into rigid bicyclics, the kind of saturated scaffold medicinal chemists want in place of benzene.
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A visible-light [2+2] on acyclic aza-1,5-dienes beats the rule of five on electronics alone. The switch has to buy back roughly 2.3 kcal/mol, and then survive a strain penalty.
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A new paper reports 5.0% quantum yield for nitrogen reduction at ambient pressure and 10.8% under pressurised nitrogen, driven by cheap iron(II) salts and ultraviolet C light.
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