Rotaxanes with integrated photoswitches: design principles, functional behavior, and emerging applications

• Jullyane Emi Matsushima,
• Khushbu,
• Zuliah Abdulsalam,
• Udyogi Navodya Kulathilaka Conthagamage and
• Víctor García-López

Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2025, 21, 2345–2366, doi:10.3762/bjoc.21.179

• fundamental studies but also for practical applications in smart materials, responsive systems, and biomedical technologies. The synergy between molecular design, light-driven control, and functional integration positions photoswitchable rotaxanes as a highly versatile and dynamic platform for future

Framing major prebiotic transitions as stages of protocell development: three challenges for origins-of-life research

• Ben Shirt-Ediss,
• Sara Murillo-Sánchez and
• Kepa Ruiz-Mirazo

Beilstein J. Org. Chem. 2017, 13, 1388–1395, doi:10.3762/bjoc.13.135

• experimental challenges aimed at constructing protocell systems made of a diversity of functionally coupled components and, thereby, at characterizing more precisely the type of prebiotic evolutionary dynamics that such protocells could engage in. Keywords: functional integration; origins of life; prebiotic

• move the field of origins of life forward would be to couple simple chemistry to prebiotic vesicle dynamics: chemical reactions provide the power for endogenous synthesis and vesicles the adequate scaffolding for the functional integration of what is synthesized. We will proceed briefly with the issue

• of functional integration below, but the main point to highlight here is that both for reactive processes to become proto-metabolic and for vesicles to become proto-cellular, their mutual, dynamic engagement could well be an early, unavoidable requirement [40]. As Szostak [41] has also noted, the