CMP Journal 2026-06-22
Statistics
Nature: 3
Nature Physics: 3
Nature
C-glycoside synthesis via radical cross-coupling of glycohydrazides
Original Paper | Carbohydrate chemistry | 2026-06-21 20:00 EDT
Yinliang Guo, Yiheng Li, Benedikt Buchberger, Yixin Liu, Carla Capone, Tapas Adak, Shubham Ojha, Jasper L. Tyler, Philipp Neigenfind, Molhm Nassir, Yu Kawamata, Varinder K. Aggarwal, Phil S. Baran
Carbohydrates are among the most abundant and structurally diverse biomolecules in nature, playing central roles in energy storage, molecular recognition, and cell signaling. Within this domain, C-glycosides1-3, in which the oxygen atom of the glycosidic bond in O-glycosides is replaced by carbon, have emerged as valuable motifs in medicinal chemistry due to their resistance to enzymatic hydrolysis2,4. Of particular importance are C-aryl glycosides, exemplified by the SGLT2 inhibitors dapagliflozin, canagliflozin, and empagliflozin, which are frontline therapies for type 2 diabetes5-7. However, scalable syntheses of C-aryl glycosides have traditionally relied on protected sugar derivatives, lengthy sequences, or conventional cross-couplings that often suffer from poor selectivity, limited scope, and extensive protecting-group manipulation6. Herein, we report a practical approach to C-aryl glycosides using glycosyl sulfonyl hydrazides as redox-neutral radical precursors for cross-coupling. Prepared directly from unprotected native sugars, these reagents generate glycosyl radicals under mild conditions and enable efficient access to diverse C-aryl glycosides, including all approved SGLT2 inhibitors, natural products such as salmochelins and neopetrosins, and medicinally relevant probes. Beyond anomeric functionalization, this platform enables C-C bond formation at multiple positions on carbohydrate scaffolds and supports stereoretentive radical coupling that can override inherent stereochemical biases, expanding practical access to carbohydrate-derived therapeutics and chemical tools.
Carbohydrate chemistry, Synthetic chemistry methodology
Stereoretentive decarbonylative C(sp3)-C(sp3) cross-coupling
Original Paper | Asymmetric catalysis | 2026-06-21 20:00 EDT
Zhidao Huang, Tianrui Wu, Zehao Yuan, Chuxiong Meng, Leah C. Garman, Ilia A. Guzei, Bin Wu, Daniel J. Weix
While C(sp3)-C(sp3) bond-forming cross-coupling methods have become more common, stereocontrolled bond-formation remains a challenge,1 despite its importance for drug discovery, where there is a emerging demand for molecules with increased sp3 character.2-4 Enantiospecific cross-coupling approaches would complement advances in enantioselective coupling,5-8 but have been limited to specialized substrates with lower availability5,9 because stereospecific oxidative addition of more abundant chiral alkyl electrophiles is unknown.10 Inspired by the classic, stereoretentive Curtius rearrangement,11 herein we disclose a catalytic strategy that proceeds by an analogous stereoretentive decarbonylation step to form a versatile chiral alkylnickel intermediate from easily-available chiral amino-acid and α-hydroxy-acid derivatives. The chiral alkylnickel intermediates decompose and/or racemize on the order of minutes, but are sufficiently stable to enable stereoretentive cross-electrophile coupling12 with alkyl radicals (derived from alkyl iodides) at relatively low temperature (22-40 °C). This mechanistic strategy provides a straightforward approach to stereocontrolled C(sp3)-C(sp3) bond formation, including diastereomers that are inaccessible by stereoselective radical mechanisms. The “metallo-Curtius” strategy described in this study lays a mechanistic foundation for the development many new stereospecific cross-coupling reactions.
Asymmetric catalysis, Catalytic mechanisms, Synthetic chemistry methodology
Isotopic evidence for a cold and distant origin of 3I/ATLAS
Original Paper | Asteroids, comets and Kuiper belt | 2026-06-21 20:00 EDT
Martin Cordiner, Nathan X. Roth, Marco Micheli, Geronimo Villanueva, Davide Farnocchia, Steven Charnley, Nicolas Biver, Dominique Bockelée-Morvan, Dennis Bodewits, Colin Orion Chandler, Jacques Crovisier, Maria N. Drozdovskaya, Kenji Furuya, Michael S. P. Kelley, Stefanie Milam, John W. Noonan, Cyrielle Opitom, Megan E. Schwamb, Cristina A. Thomas
Interstellar objects provide the only directly observable samples of icy planetesimals formed around other stars, and can therefore provide insight into the diversity of physical and chemical conditions occurring during exoplanet formation1-3. Here we report isotopic measurements of the interstellar comet 3I/ATLAS, which reveal an elemental composition unlike any Solar System body. The water in 3I/ATLAS is enriched in deuterium, at a level of D/H = (0.98 ± 0.06)%, which is more than an order of magnitude higher than in known comets, while its range of 12C/13C ratios (141-191 for CO2 and 123-172 for CO) exceeds typical values found in the Solar System, as well as nearby interstellar clouds and protoplanetary disks. Such extreme isotopic signatures indicate formation at temperatures ≲ 30 K in a relatively metal-poor environment. When interpreted with respect to models for Galactic chemical evolution, the carbon isotopic composition implies that 3I/ATLAS may have accreted as long ago as 12 billion years, following a period of intense, early star formation. 3I/ATLAS thus represents a preserved fragment of an ancient planetary system.
Asteroids, comets and Kuiper belt, Astrophysical disks, Early solar system, Exoplanets, Interstellar medium
Nature Physics
Creases as information bottlenecks in active elastic sheets
Original Paper | Biological physics | 2026-06-21 20:00 EDT
Charlotte M. Brannon, Manu Prakash
Self-folding materials capable of autonomous transitions between two- and three-dimensional states are widespread in biological active solids and are relevant to engineered systems. However, the programmability and robustness of self-folding behaviour, particularly in living tissues, remain poorly understood. Here we study a self-folding and unfolding mode in the early-diverging aneural animal Trichoplax adhaerens. We discover sharp crease lines that act as one-dimensional domain walls, compartmentalizing the animal’s cilia orientation field into disjointed patches. These creases undergo rapid geometric and topological remodelling on a timescale of seconds, driven by the interplay of tissue buckling, surface adhesion and ciliary activity. Elementary unit operations such as merging and splitting organize the creases into a dynamic defect network at the interface between the animal’s ciliated epithelium and its substrate. We show that creases locally disrupt ciliary coordination, act as information bottlenecks between adjacent ciliary patches and establish a feedback loop between ciliary activity and crease geometry. This feedback confers self-limiting behaviour, enabling the emergence of anticorrelated active states that remove the crease. This emergent mechanism suggests design principles for a class of robust, self-folding two-dimensional materials and demonstrates how information bottlenecks can manifest physically as creases in soft epithelial tissue.
Biological physics, Biophysics, Materials science, Motility, Soft materials
The physical consequences of sperm gigantism
Original Paper | Biological physics | 2026-06-21 20:00 EDT
Jasmin Imran Alsous, Brato Chakrabarti, Bryce Palmer, Michael J. Shelley
Males of the fruit fly Drosophila melanogaster produce sperm that are each, on average, a couple of millimetres long. Thousands of sperm are stored in a seminal vesicle of only about 200 µm in size. Although the evolutionary pressures underlying such extreme flagellar lengths have been investigated, the physical consequences of their gigantism remain unclear. Here we show that sperm are packed into a dense and highly aligned state. We also find that sperm exhibit system-wide collective material flows with persistent and slow-moving topological defects. Individual sperm, despite their extraordinary lengths and in contrast to their feeble motility in isolation, propagate rapidly through the flagellar material, moving in either direction along material director lines. To rationalize how these collective behaviours arise from the non-equilibrium dynamics of the constituents, we conceptualize the motion of individual sperm as topologically confined to a reptation-like tube formed by its neighbours. Here sperm advance through amplitude-constrained and internally driven bending waves, pushing off counterpropagating flagella. We derive a continuum theory that produces an extensile stress that can sustain an aligned flagellar material, and verify theoretical predictions. Our work suggests that active stresses in the flagellar material maintain the sperm unentangled in both male and female storage organs and establishes giant sperm in their native habitat as a physiologically relevant active matter system.
Biological physics, Biopolymers in vivo
Emergent partons in fractional quantum Hall systems
Original Paper | Electronic properties and materials | 2026-06-21 20:00 EDT
Zihao Yang, Yifan Wang, Xinyu Lu, Ziyu Liu, Kirk W. Baldwin, Ken W. West, Loren N. Pfeiffer, Bo Yang, Ajit C. Balram, Lingjie Du
In the fractional quantum Hall effect, electrons can fractionalize into quasiparticles. These are referred to as partons, and this picture provides an intuitive framework for understanding fractionalized states. Low-energy partons are equivalent to the established composite fermion states. High-energy partons are predicted to exist, but have not yet been demonstrated experimentally. Recently, a geometrical theory for the fractional quantum Hall effect was proposed. In this description, chiral spin-2 neutral excitations–also termed gravitons–arise from fluctuations of the quantum metric. Here we report the observation of multiple chiral gravitons using circularly polarized resonant inelastic light scattering. At a filling factor of 2/7, our experiments reveal two sharp modes with opposite chiralities that we identify as low- and high-energy gravitons. By contrast, at a filling factor of 2/9, multiple gravitons exhibit the same chirality. In the gapless Fermi-liquid-like state at a filling factor of 1/4, the high-energy graviton persists as a gapped chiral excitation. These observations identify chiral gravitons as geometrical excitations of their corresponding partons. Our work introduces a method to detect partons through chiral graviton measurements, opening the exploration of fractionalized matter.
Electronic properties and materials, Magneto-optics, Quantum Hall, Raman spectroscopy