Volume 93, Issue 12

Recent years have witnessed the emergence of liquid gating technologies that employ liquids as structural materials to provide dynamic gating control. Such technologies have attracted considerable attention globally owing their antifouling, energy-saving, reversible, and reconfigurable characteristics. This study considers a new perspective to discuss advancements in liquid gating technologies, including the concept, mechanisms, development, designs, and emerging applications. Moreover, recommendations are provided for the selection of the gating liquid and porous matrix, preparation processes, technical parameters, and theoretical modelling to guide related research. Emerging applications of liquid gating technologies, such as microscale flow control, multiphase separation, chemical detection, and biomedical catheters, are reported. Finally, the challenges currently faced by these technologies are discussed and potential directions for further research are explored to promote the use of these technologies in future applications.

During the last 20 years, organocatalysis has significantly advanced as a field. Thanks to contributions from hundreds of groups and companies around the world, the area has risen from a few mechanistically ill-defined niche reactions, to one of the most vibrant and innovative fields in chemistry, providing several well-defined generic activation modes for selective catalysis. Organocatalysis is also on the rise in industrial settings, especially for the production of enantiomers, which are of use in fine chemistry, pharma, crop-protection, and fragrance chemistry. Here we will look at some of the specific elements of organocatalysis that we think are particularly attractive and contribute to this successful development.

Functional materials serve as the basic elements for the evolution of technology. Aggregation-induced emission (AIE), as one of the top 10 emerging technologies in chemistry, is a scientific concept coined by Tang, et al. in 2001 and refers to a photophysical phenomenon with enhanced emission at the aggregate level compared to molecular states. AIE-active materials generally present new properties and performance that are absent in the molecular state, providing endless possibilities for the development of technological applications. Tremendous achievements based on AIE research have been made in theoretical exploration, material development and practical applications. In this review, AIE-active materials with triggered luminescence of circularly polarized luminescence, aggregation-induced delayed fluorescence, room-temperature phosphorescence, and clusterization-triggered emission at the aggregate level are introduced. Moreover, high-tech applications in optoelectronic devices, responsive systems, sensing and monitoring, and imaging and therapy are briefly summarized and discussed. It is expected that this review will serve as a source of inspiration for innovation in AIE research and aggregate science.

The Earth’s environment is mainly composed of the aerosphere, hydrosphere, pedosphere, lithosphere, and biosphere, which constitute a large interactive system. Once entering the environment, chemical pollutants will migrate and transform through the atmosphere, water, soil, rock, and organisms, and thus retain in all layers. For example, heavy metal pollutants can be found not only in the hydrosphere, pedosphere, lithosphere, but also in organisms via food chain and air in the form of solid dust. Therefore, it is not reasonable to study a certain pollutant restricted to a single layer.

The philosophy of sustainable development is prevailing worldwide, and will probably bring about a society revolution trend in the future. Catalytic chemistry will play a crucial role in sustainable economic development since at least a catalytic process is involved in almost all-important areas of chemical industry, such as synthesis of chemicals and materials, energy production and conversion as well as pollution abatement and environmental protection. In this paper, we attempt to summarize three common critical directions for catalysis research, in order to meet future needs for sustainable economic development. (i) The discovery of high-performance catalysts will evolve from trial-and-error to rational design. This is due to the maturing theory-experiment joint research schemes and the increasing abilities to explore dynamic nature of catalysts under reaction conditions. (ii) The catalysis for the transition of energy and chemicals generation from oil and coal to more renewable sources will be highly pursued. (iii) The catalysis for cleaner chemical processes will be another active research direction. In Sections “Sustainable catalysis for renewable fuels and chemicals” and “Ecologically clean catalytic process”, some important examples are discussed especially.

Theoretical and computational chemistry aims to develop chemical theory and to apply numerical computation and simulation to reveal the mechanism behind complex chemical phenomena via quantum theory and statistical mechanics. Computation is the third pillar of scientific research together with theory and experiment. Computation enables scientists to test, discover, and build models/theories of the corresponding chemical phenomena. Theoretical and computational chemistry has been advanced to a new era due to the development of high-performance computational facilities and artificial intelligence approaches. The tendency to merge electronic structural theory with quantum chemical dynamics and statistical mechanics is of increasing interest because of the rapid development of on-the-fly dynamic simulations for complex systems plus low-scaling electronic structural theory. Another challenging issue lies in the transition from order to disorder, from thermodynamics to dynamics, and from equilibrium to non-equilibrium. Despite an increasingly rapid emergence of advances in computational power, detailed criteria for databases, effective data sharing strategies, and deep learning workflows have yet to be developed. Here, we outline some challenges and limitations of the current artificial intelligence approaches with an outlook on the potential future directions for chemistry in the big data era.

Energy is an important substantial foundation for the survival and development of humans. However, the over-consumption of resources and environmental pollution have become more prominent. The key factors for solving energy problems are to increase energy utilization efficiency and optimize energy structure. The development of new materials is the research emphasis in the field of material chemistry all the time. For instance, developing new light-capture materials and catalysts to improve the efficiency of existing photovoltaic cells is one of the most effective approaches to increasing solar power capacity radically. The design of high-performance catalytic materials to make better use of energy from fossil fuels and biomass. In addition, it is an important research direction of material chemistry and energy chemistry to deeply understand the reaction mechanism of energy conversion.

Over the past decade, the global research agenda focused on finding paths to the future development of chemistry. Chemical detection and measurement is an important and fundamental discipline of chemistry and it keeps playing a significant role in chemical research in the next 10–15 years. The goal of chemical detection is to overcome the state-of-art temporospatial resolution limit. Meanwhile, the application of modern chemical technology to serve human health is also highly concerned. We have summarized 10 aspects related to the field, including complex samples analysis, biomacromolecule structure and function, single-entity analysis, large-scale scientific instrument, rapid chemical and electron transfer processes, big data and artificial intelligence, bioimaging, in vivo real-time detection, biomolecule recognition and disease therapy, and public health screening. In this review, we outlined the history and the frontiers of chemical detection and measurements in enhancing the development of chemical sciences. Moreover, we also focused on the major challenges that should be solved in the future in which researchers should develop new techniques and analytical methods to drastically accelerate chemical sciences.

After being developed over hundred years, synthetic chemistry has created numerous new molecules and new materials to support a better life welfare. Even so, many challenges still remain in synthetic chemistry, higher selectivity, higher efficiency, environmental benign and sustainable energy are never been so wistful before. Herein, several topics surrounded the ability improvement of synthesis and the application enhancement of synthesis will be briefly discussed.

Over the past decades, researchers have witnessed substantially increasing and ever-growing interests and efforts in Chemical Biology studies, thanks to the development of genome and epi-genome sequencing (revealing potential drug targets), synthetic chemistry (producing new medicines), bioorthogonal chemistry (chemistry in living systems) and high-throughput screening technologies ( in vitro cell systems, protein binding assays and phenotypic assays). This report presents literature search results for current research in Chemical Biology, to explore basic principles, summarize recent advances, identify key challenges, and provide suggestions for future research (with a focus on Chemical Biology in the context of human health and diseases). Chemical Biology research can positively contribute to delivering a better understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms that accompany pathology underlying diseases, as well as developing improved methods for diagnosis, drug discovery, and therapeutic delivery. While much progress has been made, as shown in this report, there are still further needs and opportunities. For instance, pressing challenges still exist in selecting appropriate targets in biological systems and adopting more rational design strategies for the development of innovative and sustainable diagnostic technologies and medical treatments. Therefore, more than ever, researchers from different disciplines need to collaborate to address the challenges in Chemical Biology.

Seawater pH values are of the highest relevance in marine chemistry studies, not only through being acidity indicators but also due to the control provided by H + (aq) over the various simultaneous equilibria occurring in seawater. Although the concept of pH=−lgaH+=−lg(mH+γH+/m0)$\mathrm{p}\mathrm{H}=-\mathrm{l}\mathrm{g}{\mathit{a}}_{{\mathrm{H}}^{+}}=-\mathrm{lg}\left({\mathit{m}}_{{\mathrm{H}}^{+}}{\mathit{\gamma }}_{{\mathrm{H}}^{+}}/{\mathit{m}}^{0}\right)$, where mH+${m}_{{\text{H}}^{+}}$ is the relative (molality basis) activity, γH+${\gamma }_{{\text{H}}^{+}}$ is the molal activity coefficient of the hydrogen ion H + at molality mH+${m}_{{\text{H}}^{+}}$, and m 0 is the standard molality, was introduced in 1910 and reaffirmed on successive occasions by relevant bodies, different conceptual definitions and alternative measurement procedures have been adopted and are in use by some, namely among oceanographers, often leading to confusion. This leads to major difficulties with the use of data, e.g. , on what concerns comparison of results in space and time. Primary pH values, the highest quality level in terms of the metrological chain, have been assigned to primary reference pH buffer solutions of low ionic strength, by a primary method based on measurements of the Harned cell potential in association with the Nernst equation, as well as on the adoption of extra-thermodynamic model assumptions for electrolyte solutions. Although equivalent types of recommendations dealing with standards and procedures based on metrological traceability are still lacking for higher ionic strength media, as it is in the case of seawater, reference Tris–Tris·HCl buffer solutions in artificial seawater have been suggested for use in the calibration of pH meter systems. In this work, Tris–Tris·HCl buffer saline solutions of three different molality ratios m Tris: m Tris.HCl, m /mol kg −1 H 2 O, have been assigned reference values for free pH=−lg aH+$\mathrm{p}\mathrm{H}=-\mathrm{lg}\,{a}_{{\text{H}}^{+}}$ and total pHT=−lg (mH+*/m0)${\mathrm{pH}}^{\mathrm{T}}=-\text{lg}\left({m}_{{\text{H}}^{+}}^{\text{{\ast}}}/{m}^{0}\right)$, where m 0  = 1 mol kg −1 and mH+*=limm→mSW[m(H+)+m(HSO4−)]${m}_{{\text{H}}^{+}}^{\text{{\ast}}}=\underset{m\to {m}_{\text{SW}}}{\mathrm{lim}}\left[m\left({\mathrm{H}}^{\mathrm{+}}\right)+m\left({\mathrm{HSO}}_{4}^{\mathbf{-}}\right)\right]$. Multi-point calibration of pH meters in terms of either pH or pH T is thus possible and supports measurement of their respective values under routine conditions at a high metrological level.