This week’s #ChemSciPicks is an Edge article from Stephen Craig (Duke University), Todd Martinez (Stanford University) and colleagues!

Their study explores structure-property relationships for the force-triggered disrotatory ring-opening of cyclobutene.

Read for free at https://doi.org/10.1039/D5SC00253B!

Symmetry forbidden reactions have been explored comprehensively using theoretical methods but they are incredibly challenging to study using experimental techniques. This is because the competing symmetry allowed pathways typically dominate.

In this work, the authors show that covalent polymer mechanochemistry can be used to broad access to symmetry forbidden reactions, through the specific placement of polymer handles on mechanophore reactants.

The authors use both single molecule force spectroscopy and computation to evaluate substituent effects on disrotatory ring opening of cyclobutene to butadiene. This demonstrates the utility of mechanical bias to force symmetry forbidden processes experimentally.

#Chemistry

The final #ChemSciPicks for this year is "Inverse design of copolymers including stoichiometry and chain architecture" by Gabriel Vogel and Jana Weber from TU Delft.

Read it for free here: https://pubs.rsc.org/en/content/articlelanding/2025/sc/d4sc05900j

#Chemistry

In the ChemSci Pick of the Week, Dr Chaofeng Zhang and colleagues from Anhui University designed a new covalent organic framework with dual redox-active sites through a simple condensation reaction of TA and PTO-NH2 in a Schiff base reaction.

You can read it here, for free: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC07013A

#Chemistry #ChemSci #ChemSciPicks

This week’s #ChemSciPicks comes from Patrick Holland at Yale University and looks at an unusual way to access a formally iron(IV) alkyl complexes to form an NNSi2 group. Check out the work here: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC05939A

All work published in Chemical Science is free to read via Diamond Open Access!

#ChemicalScience #Chemistry #Publishing #OpenAccess

In our ChemSci Pick of the Week, Jeremiah Gassensmith et al. (University of Texas at Dallas, USA) show that the biomimetic mineralisation of the inert model antigen ovalbumin (OVA) in zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8) significantly improves the humoral immune response over three bolus doses of OVA (OVA 3×).

Read the work here, in full and for free: https://pubs.rsc.org/doi/D3SC06734C

#Chemistry #ChemSci #ChemicalScience #ChemSciPicks #Research #Publishing #OpenAccess

The #ChemSciPicks for this week is from Gabriel Loget, Neso Sojic and colleagues.

Infrared Photoinduced Electrochemiluminescence Microscopy of Single Cells

Read the paper, free via Diamond Open Access, here:

https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC05983A

#ChemicalScience #Microscopy #ChemSci #Chemistry

This weeks #ChemSciPicks is a fantastic Edge article from Charlotte Deane et al., (University of Oxford).

This Edge article reports PoseBusters, a Python package that performs a series of standard quality checks using the well-established cheminformatics toolkit RDKit.

You can read the work for free here:

https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC04185A

#Chemistry

(This was the paper that I was excited to share and I am so glad that the rest of the Chemical Science editorial team agreed with me!)

This week's Chemical Science Pick of the Week is "Small Molecular Adjuvant Repurposes Antibiotics towards Gram-negative Bacterial Infections and Multispecies Bacterial Biofilm", by Rajib Dey, Sudip Mukherjee, Riya Mukherjee and Jayanta Haldar from the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR) in Bangalore, India.

Read it for free with #DiamondOpenAccess: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC05124B

#ChemicalScience #Chemistry #ChemSciPicks

This week's #ChemSciPicks is by Matt Sigman and colleagues at University of Utah, University of Michigan and Joint Center for Energy Storage Research.

✨Data Science Enabled Discovery of a Highly Soluble 2,2’Bipyrimidine Anolyte for Application in a Flow Battery✨

Read here for free, with Diamond Open Access💎: https://doi.org/10.1039/D3SC04084D