Diatomic catalysts have attracted much attention, especially in electrochemistry. However, there have been no comprehensive reviews on long-range interactions (LRIs) between metallic centres. This Minireview introduces the key aspects of LRIs and highlights opportunities for regulating electrocatalytic mechanisms, thus presenting guidelines for the targeted usage of LRIs.

This review brings out the key advancements made in the field of alkaline HER with metal hydroxides and their heterostructures and also provides a detailed and critical analysis of strategies and perspectives used with highlights on future prospects at the end.

The selective electrochemical reduction of CO₂ to CO provides a promising approach to realize a sustainable, carbon-neutral economy. This Review gives a comprehensive overview focusing on catalyst and electrolyte design, and their integration with electrolyzer technology towards industrial implementation. The current challenges in the commercial use of CO₂ electrolysis to generate CO are also presented to enable future developments.

The concept of the electrocatalytic refinery (e-refinery) is an intrinsically sustainable strategy to convert renewable feedstocks and energy sources to transportable fuels and value-added chemicals. This Review describes the concept, fundamentals, and framework of e-refinery processes with some game-changing reactions and innovative catalyst design strategies.

Structural evolution is crucial to the development of active sites for renewable energy-conversion technologies involving heterogeneous electrocatalysis. In this Minireview, fundamental concepts related to structural evolution are described. A critical overview of multiple triggers, reversibility and operando characterizations is presented, and the application of structural evolution in important electrocatalytic reactions is presented.

This Review describes the basic principles of water electrolysis, key aspects of the oxygen evolution reaction (OER), and significant criteria for the development of new catalysts. Recent advances in catalysts based on Co, Ni, and Fe oxides are described, and a brief perspective is given on green hydrogen production and the challenges of water electrolysis.

Fuel cells are a powerful renewable energy technology. This review gives a comprehensive overview on oxygen reduction electrocatalysts towards practical fuel cells.

The synergistic combination of photoredox and transition metal catalysis enables the installation of C(sp³)-hybridized centers under exceedingly low energy barriers, rendering this platform a formidable tool in synthetic applications. To fully harness this mode of catalysis, considerable efforts have been devoted toward stereoselective transformations. This Minireview discusses milestones to accomplish and understand the origin of stereoinduction in these processes.

External fields, including microwaves, mechanical stress, temperature gradient, external electric field, magnetic field, and coupled multiple fields, provide an effective and facile strategy to enhance the photocatalytic performance of semiconductors.

Despite the rapid developments in the past decade, many great challenges remain for the practical use of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) based electrocatalysts. This Minireview summaries some major recent research efforts and advances on MOF-based electrocatalysts for the oxygen reduction reaction. Some promising directions and strategies are also discussed.

Regulation strategies for enhancing the intrinsic electrocatalytic oxygen reduction reaction activity of M–N–C single-atom catalysts are summarized in this review. Four components are considered in the optimization of the catalyst: the center metal atoms, the coordinated atoms, the environmental atoms, and the guest groups.

Chiral cyclopentadienyls (Cp^X) have emerged as powerful steering ligands in asymmetric catalysis. This Review discusses the existing ligand classes, their design, syntheses, and metalation methods. Details on the successful application of the metal complexes in numerous catalytic processes are provided. Those include C−H bond functionalization chemistry and beyond, enabling access to valuable chiral molecules.

Mimicking natural photosynthesis: The latest progress on Z-scheme photocatalytic systems for CO₂ reduction is comprehensively discussed in this Review. Particular attention is given to modification strategies that improve photocatalytic performance as well as confirmation methods to assess the Z-scheme charge transfer mechanism.

Peroxide from sunlight: The production of H₂O₂ by photocatalysis is a sustainable process, since it uses water and oxygen as the source materials and solar light as the energy. Encouraging processes have been developed in the last decade for the photocatalytic production of H₂O₂, and these are discussed in this Review.

Biocatalysis has developed into a mature technology for chemical and pharmaceutical synthesis as well as other areas where high selectivity and mild reaction conditions are required. This Review highlights recent achievements with a special focus on industrialized applications including the introduction of key performance indicators (KPIs) to judge the efficiency of enzymes.

Single-atom nanozymes contain atomically active sites and they are similar to natural metalloenzymes; they hold great promise in sensing, degradation of organic pollutants, and in therapeutic applications. Moreover, single-atom catalysts help to unravel structure–activity relationships and thereby uncover the nature of biocatalysts at a single-atom scale.

Lighting the (reaction) path: Photoredox and photocatalysis have recently provided fresh opportunities to expand the potential of organic synthesis. So far, innovation has mainly been driven by the quest for novel reactivities, often at the expense of a thorough mechanistic understanding. But these fields are now entering a more mature phase where the combination of experimental and mechanistic studies will play a dominant role in sustaining further innovation.

Focusing on the long-lasting debates surrounding the activity descriptor for the electrocatalytic hydrogen evolution reaction in alkaline conditions, some fundamental studies, from theoretical computations and surface electrochemistry on single crystal models, to practical electrocatalysts with large surfaces, are summarized.

A latecomer worth waiting for: In the last two years manganese complexes have been identified as highly active catalysts for diverse hydrogenation and dehydrogenation reactions. The results in this field are summarized and discussed and compared to iron and cobalt catalysts.

Tiny concentrations of oxygen vacancies on the surface of real photocatalysts can influence the kinetics and energetics and the mechanisms of photocatalytic reactions decisively. Oxygen vacancies on BiOCl surfaces are described at the molecular level, and their structure correlated with reactivity and selectivity in photocatalytic reactions.