Nanochannels with different dimensions have shown broad applications in various areas. Among them, 1D nanochannels are mostly studied in both molecular dynamic simulations and experiments. 1D nanoconfined chemical reactions, which refer to the reactions occurring in 1D nanoconfined channels, have been extensively studied. Generally, 1D nanoconfined chemical reactions exhibit improved performance, which can be ascribed to the nanoconfinement. However, the intrinsic mechanism of this nanoconfinement-enhanced performance remains unclear. This is a challenging problem to be solved in the field of 1D nanoconfined chemical reactions. 

Recently, Prof. Lei Jiang and Dr. Xiqi Zhang from Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences have published a Progress Report entitled “1D Nanoconfined Ordered-Assembly Reaction” on Adv. Mater. Interfaces (Adv. Mater. Interfaces. 2019, 6, 1900104), which is selected as the back cover article. The perspectives on 1D nanoconfined chemical reactions including organic syntheses and polymerization are provided, followed by the 1D nanoconfined preassembled reactions. Then, they focus on ultrafast mass transport in biological and artificial nanochannels and introduce the “quantum-confined superfluid” (QSF) concept, which represents an enthalpy-driven confined ordered fluid. Next, a new concept of ordered-assembly reaction (OAR) is proposed through combining QSF with frontier molecular orbital theory, to understand the intrinsic mechanism of high-performance 1D nanoconfined chemical reactions. In the perspective, they point out that further applying the OAR concept to 1D nanoconfined chemical reactions can promote the development of bioinspired interfacial catalytic chemistry theory and realize the integration of high reaction efficiency, yield, and selectivity. This new OAR concept will definitely act as a new guidance for the future development of chemistry, chemical industry, and synthetic biology. 

The first author of this article is LIU Shijie, a Ph.D. candidate from Technical Institute of Physics and Chemistry of Chinese Academy of Sciences. This work is supported by the National Key R&D program of China, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the 111 Project. 

Figure. 1D Nanoconfined Ordered-Assembly Reaction (Image by Zhang Xiqi) 

Link：https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/admi.201900104  

E-mail: xqzhang@mail.ipc.ac.cn