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A reviews journal from Cell Press. We publish thoughtfully designed Review, Opinion, and short articles covering the breadth of chemistry in an accessible, educational manner. https://www.cell.com/trends/chemistry/home

🧩The June issue of TRECHEM is out now! The cover highlights the Review from Ling-Ping Xiao and colleagues on the chemical modification of polysaccharides as a key platform for next-gen adhesives. Read the article in our latest issue: www.cell.com/trends/chemistry/issue?pii=S2589-5974(25)X0007-1

Intrinsic plasticization enables flexibility in bioplastics through molecular modification rather than using external plasticizers. By modifying polymer architecture, this approach can improve performance and stability. However, challenges in scalability, trade-offs in property performance, and sustainability remain, highlighting the need for integrated design approaches that link chemistry, processing, and real-world applications.

Depolymerization-based chemical recycling offers a promising route to a circular plastic economy but faces a trade-off between polymerization and depolymerization. Sun and colleagues recently addressed this challenge with strained bridged bicyclic monomers for metathesis polymerization, using entropy as a powerful and effective design principle.

A recent study by Meng et al. reports the direct desaturation of alkenes to alkynes, addressing a century-old synthetic challenge. Utilizing a recyclable selenanthrene reagent, this methodology operates under mild conditions with high selectivity. Broad functional group tolerance enables late-stage transformation of complex molecules, providing sustainable routes to versatile alkynes.

Over the last decade, organic photochemistry has pushed its frontiers toward the red-light end of the electromagnetic spectrum. Driven by breakthroughs in molecular engineering and photophysical understanding, red-light photocatalysis and photoswitching have emerged as two interconnected pillars of modern synthetic chemistry.

Therapeutic antibody development traditionally relies on costly, time-consuming animal studies. This review examines how defined chemical models—including phosphate-buffered saline and continuous-flow dialysis systems—reliably predict antibody degradation, potentially reducing animal testing. By controlling physiological variables (pH, temperature, and redox potential), these models accurately predict pathways: deamidation, isomerization, pyroglutamate formation, thiol-disulfide exchange, and glycation. They are particularly valuable during early development with limited clinical material. Chemical in vitro approaches outperform traditional serum-based systems through superior control and reproducibility. We identify gaps, notably the lack of predictive oxidation models, and propose next-generation systems incorporating trace metals and antioxidants to simulate in vivo catalytic pathways. These advances align with the 3Rs principles (Replacement, Reduction, and Refinement) while accelerating development timelines and improving quality assurance.

Important short-lived states are often obscured by signals from more stable conformations in ensemble-averaged experiments analyzing protein interactions and catalytic reactions. To address this challenge, the single-molecule junction (SMJ) technique has been increasingly employed to elucidate intricate dynamic changes by monitoring intermediate states at the single-molecule level. This review outlines the creation of SMJs and the subsequent data processing steps. Furthermore, it discusses the broad applications of this technique in analyzing biomolecular interactions and enzyme catalysis mechanisms. Finally, the advantages and challenges of this technique are summarized, and its prospective development, promising applications, and the boundless potential for single-molecule protein studies are highlighted, serving as a key driver for the field’s advancement.

Natural products are vital to drug discovery but are often limited by poor solubility, stability, and target specificity. Click chemistry, with its efficient and bioorthogonal reactions, enables precise modification of these compounds. It is instrumental in key discovery stages: chiral separation, high-throughput screening library construction, target identification using activity-based probes, and prodrug structural optimization. Under mild conditions, modular click reactions markedly improve the druggability of natural products. This review surveys these applications and discusses future directions, including integration with artificial intelligence, positioning click chemistry as a key platform for developing next-generation natural product-based therapeutics.

Bisphenols are crucial building blocks for the production of diverse plastics and resins. Conventional bisphenol compounds, such as bisphenol A (BPA), have raised sustainability and health concerns. As a renewable solution, the conversion of lignin into bio-based bisphenols for synthesizing polymeric materials with comparable or even superior properties to conventional BPA-derived polymers represents a sustainable and promising approach. Here, recent advances in the valorization of lignin into sustainable bisphenols and their applications in thermosetting and thermoplastic polymers are summarized. The key pathways for synthesizing lignin-derived bisphenols and their corresponding polymers, along with the properties of these polymers, are discussed.