The artificial synthesis of medicinal compounds that are typically derived from natural sources helps scientists to better understand how they function and deduce whether they can be enhanced. Unfortunately, the work involved in synthesising such natural compounds and their analogues is extremely difficult. Professor Hyun-Joon Ha and his team from Hankuk University of Foreign Studies in the Republic of Korea are exploring ways to transform compounds called aziridines into a range of biologically active molecules.

The far-reaching benefits of nanopore research encompass fields as diverse as physics, healthcare, big data processing and environmental studies. At the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Dr Jean-Pierre Leburton is conducting research focused on the use of nanopores in ultrathin solid-state molecular materials, such as graphene and 2D transition-metal dichalcogenides, for DNA sensing applications. This offers a low-cost and highly effective method of identifying biomolecules, and could have widespread medical applications, enabling rapid, early and effective disease diagnosis and prompting effective treatment, as well as providing invaluable technologies for assisting with DNA sequencing.