IUPAC Announces the 2025 Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry

doi:10.1515/ci-2025-0408

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IUPAC Announces the 2025 Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry

Published/Copyright: October 29, 2025

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From the journal Chemistry International Volume 47 Issue 4

Abstract

IUPAC has now released the 2025 Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry. The goal of this initiative is to showcase the transformative value of chemistry and to inform the general public about the potential of the chemical sciences to foster the well-being of Society and the sustainability of our planet.

The 2025 finalists are (in alphabetical order):

Additive Manufacturing
Carbon Dots
Direct Air Capture
Electrochemical Carbon dioxide Capture
Multimodal Foundation Models for Structure Elucidation
Nanochain Biosensor
Single-Atom Catalysis
Synthetic Cells
Thermogelling Polymers
Xolography

The Jury*—an international panel of scientists with a varied and broad range of expertise—reviewed and discussed the diverse pool of nominations of emerging technologies that were submitted by researchers from around the globe, ultimately selecting the final top ten that cover a broad range of fields from synthesis and polymer chemistry to health and machine learning. These technologies are defined as transformative innovations that lie in between a eureka-moment discovery and a fully-commercialized technology and that have outstanding potential to open new opportunities in chemistry, sustainability, and beyond. IUPAC’s objective in putting these highly-innovative ideas under the spotlight, is to strongly encourage collaboration across all scientific disciplines in order to accelerate progress towards a more sustainable and equitable world.

In its seventh consecutive year of operation, the IUPAC Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry initiative continues to look into sustainability and circularity, connecting new and innovative ideas towards a greener future, while maintaining a strong interest in the development of methods for the improvement of human health. Overall, the selection of the 2025 Top Ten, carefully crafted by a panel of experts from a pool of global nominations, continues to carry the spirit established by the first Top Ten list released in 2019 and that is to highlight the potential of chemistry—and chemists—to provide solutions to the most urgent societal issues.

The 2025 Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry are further detailed in a feature article published in the October issue of Chemistry International (CI). Fernando Gomollón-Bel, the author of that feature, recognized that this edition showcases once more the versatility and variability of creativity in chemistry. As noted above, he concludes his review by saying that “IUPAC’s objective in putting these highly-innovative ideas under the spotlight, is to strongly encourage collaboration across all scientific disciplines in order to accelerate progress towards a more sustainable and equitable world”.

The first selection of the Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry was released in 2019 as a special activity honoring IUPAC’s 100th anniversary. The results were published in the April 2019 issue of Chemistry International, 41(2), pp. 12-17, 2019 (https://doi.org/10.1515/ci-2019-0203) The results of subsequent editions and the related articles in CI can be accessed at: https://iupac.org/what-we-do/top-ten/.

*The following comprised the panel of judges for the 2025 Top Ten Emerging Technologies in Chemistry: Michael Droescher, (Chair, German Association for the Advancement of Science and Medicine), Bonnie Lawlor (secretary), Ehud Keinan, Javier García Martínez, Arasu Ganesan, Molly Shoichet, Juliane Sempionatto, Mamia El-Rhazi, Jorge Alegre Cebollada, Bernard West, Natalia Tarasova, Zhigang Shuai, Rai Kookana, and Kira Welter.

https://iupac.org/what-we-do/top-ten/

Published Online: 2025-10-29

Published in Print: 2025-10-01

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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