K. Müllen et al. discuss rylene dyes as tailor-made nanoemitters in a Review. A. V. Lygin and A. de Meijere revisit the role of isocyanides in the syntheses of nitrogen heterocycles in a second Review. What makes these materials suitable for applications in photonics and single-molecule spectroscopy? In a Minireview, E. M. Carreira et al. describe oxetanes as versatile building blocks in drug research and synthesis. The Highlights deal with chemical total syntheses of diubiquitin chains (above), the stabilization of low-coordinate boron centers, and palladium-catalyzed couplings, which were the subject of this year’s Nobel prize in Chemistry.
In the Communications section, K. N. Houk et al. demonstrate that the gold-catalyzed oxygen transfer of 2-alkynyl-1,5-diketones follows a [4+2] rather than a [2+2] mechanism. R. A. Jockusch et al. found out that excited fluorescein dianions prefer electron detachment over fluorescence in the gas phase. V. W. W. Yam et al. synthesized surfactant-encapsulated organic-grafted polyoxometalates that exhibit reversible aggregation and morphological change as a result of photoisomerization-induced structural alternation thanks to built-in azobenzene groups (below).
