Nature Chemistry, Published online: 18 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41557-024-01518-9Natural protein folding takes place in aqueous cell environments. Now, it has been found that proteins in a water-free environment undergo faster and more efficient folding.

Nature Chemistry, Published online: 17 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41557-024-01512-1Phenols and their derivatives are ubiquitous in nature and important within the chemical industry. Their properties are linked to their substitution patterns, but meta-isomers are underrepresented due to the difficulty of their synthesis. Now we address this challenge by...

Nature Chemistry, Published online: 17 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41557-024-01504-1Enantioconvergent reactions convert both enantiomers of a racemic starting material into a single enantioenriched product. All currently known enantioconvergent processes necessitate the loss or partial loss of the racemic substrate’s stereochemical information. Now, an...

Nature Chemistry, Published online: 17 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41557-024-01494-0Despite their intriguing photochemical activities, natural photoenzymes have not yet been repurposed for new-to-nature activities. Now, by leveraging the strongly oxidizing excited-state flavoquinone cofactor, fatty acid photodecarboxylases were engineered to catalyse unnatural...

Nature Chemistry, Published online: 12 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41557-024-01508-xRadical polymerizations yield polymers that cannot easily be degraded. The co-polymerization of cyclobutene-based monomers with conventional vinyl monomers has now been shown to result in co-polymers with cyclobutane mechanophores in their backbone, which facilitate on-demand...

Nature Chemistry, Published online: 09 April 2024; doi:10.1038/s41557-024-01493-1RNA localization is key to regulating cellular function but is challenging to measure in an unbiased manner. Now a combination of enol-masked acylating probes with a bioorthogonal esterase to locally unmask them provides a non-radical RNA proximity labelling platform—termed...