Towards a Sustainable Future: Challenges and Opportunities for Early-Career Chemists.

The concepts of sustainability and sustainable chemistry have attracted increasing attention in recent years, being of great importance to the younger generation. In this Viewpoint Article, we share how early-career chemists can contribute to the sustainable transformation of their discipline. We identify ways in which they can engage to catalyse action for change. This article does not attempt to answer questions about the most promising or pressing areas driving research and chemical innovation in the context of sustainability. Instead, we want to inspire and engage early-career chemists in pursuing sustainable actions by showcasing opportunities in education, outreach and policymaking, research culture and publishing, while highlighting existing challenges and the complexity of the topic. We want to empower early-career chemists by providing resources and ideas for engagement for a sustainable future globally. While the article focuses on students and early-career chemists, it provides insights to further stimulate the engagement of scientists from diverse backgrounds.

Recent Advances in Affinity MOF-Based Sorbents with Sample Preparation Purposes.

This review summarizes the recent advances concerning metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) modified with several biomolecules (e.g., amino acids, nucleobases, proteins, antibodies, aptamers, etc.) as ligands to prepare affinity-based sorbents for application in the sample preparation field. The preparation and incorporation strategies of these MOF-based affinity materials were described. Additionally, the different types of ligands that can be employed for the synthesis of these biocomposites and their application as sorbents for the selective extraction of molecules and clean-up of complex real samples is reported. The most important features of the developed biocomposites will be discussed throughout the text in different sections, and several examples will be also commented on in detail.

Repositioning the Chemical Information Science Gateway.

The Chemical Information Science Gateway (CISG) of F1000Research was originally conceptualized as a forum for high-quality publications in chemical information science (CIS) including chemoinformatics. Adding a publication venue with open access and open peer review to the CIS field was a prime motivation for the introduction of CISG, aiming to support open science in this area. Herein, the CISG concept is revisited and the development of the gateway over the past four years is reviewed. In addition, opportunities are discussed to better position CISG within the publication spectrum of F1000Research and further increase its visibility and attractiveness for scientific contributions.

Prebiotic chemistry and human intervention.

Experimentalists in the field of prebiotic chemistry strive to re-enact what may have happened when life arose from inanimate material. How often human intervention was needed to obtain a specific result in their studies is worth reporting.

Recent Progress in the Design of Monodisperse, Sequence-Defined Macromolecules.

This review describes different synthetic strategies towards sequence-defined, monodisperse macromolecules, which are built up by iterative approaches and lead to linear non-natural polymer structures. The review is divided in three parts: solution phase-, solid phase-, and fluorous- and polymer-tethered approaches. Moreover, synthesis procedures leading to conjugated and non-conjugated macromolecules are considered and discussed in the respective sections. A major focus in the evaluation is the applicability of the different approaches in polymer chemistry. In this context, simple procedures for monomer and oligomer synthesis, overall yields, scalability, purity of the oligomers, and the achievable level of control (side-chains, backbone, stereochemistry) are important benchmarks.

DNA-encoded chemistry: enabling the deeper sampling of chemical space.

DNA-encoded chemical library technologies are increasingly being adopted in drug discovery for hit and lead generation. DNA-encoded chemistry enables the exploration of chemical spaces four to five orders of magnitude more deeply than is achievable by traditional high-throughput screening methods. Operation of this technology requires developing a range of capabilities including aqueous synthetic chemistry, building block acquisition, oligonucleotide conjugation, large-scale molecular biological transformations, selection methodologies, PCR, sequencing, sequence data analysis and the analysis of large chemistry spaces. This Review provides an overview of the development and applications of DNA-encoded chemistry, highlighting the challenges and future directions for the use of this technology.

Oscillatory multiphase flow strategy for chemistry and biology.

Continuous multiphase flow strategies are commonly employed for high-throughput parameter screening of physical, chemical, and biological processes as well as continuous preparation of a wide range of fine chemicals and micro/nano particles with processing times up to 10 min. The inter-dependency of mixing and residence times, and their direct correlation with reactor length have limited the adaptation of multiphase flow strategies for studies of processes with relatively long processing times (0.5-24 h). In this frontier article, we describe an oscillatory multiphase flow strategy to decouple mixing and residence times and enable investigation of longer timescale experiments than typically feasible with conventional continuous multiphase flow approaches. We review current oscillatory multiphase flow technologies, provide an overview of the advancements of this relatively new strategy in chemistry and biology, and close with a perspective on future opportunities.

Universality of Citation Distributions for Academic Institutions and Journals.

Citations measure the importance of a publication, and may serve as a proxy for its popularity and quality of its contents. Here we study the distributions of citations to publications from individual academic institutions for a single year. The average number of citations have large variations between different institutions across the world, but the probability distributions of citations for individual institutions can be rescaled to a common form by scaling the citations by the average number of citations for that institution. We find this feature seems to be universal for a broad selection of institutions irrespective of the average number of citations per article. A similar analysis for citations to publications in a particular journal in a single year reveals similar results. We find high absolute inequality for both these sets, Gini coefficients being around 0.66 and 0.58 for institutions and journals respectively. We also find that the top 25% of the articles hold about 75% of the total citations for institutions and the top 29% of the articles hold about 71% of the total citations for journals.