Perspective

Akiharu Satake and Yoshiaki Kobuke from the Nara Institute of Science and Technology, Japan review recent work into assemblies of porphyrins and phthalocyanines with strong electronic coupling, which it is hoped can be developed into antenna systems for artificial photosynthesis. 




Emerging Area and front cover

Viscosity plays an important role in biological systems. Mark Haidekker from the University of Missouri-Columbia and Emmanuel Theodorakis from UC San Diego, US, describe recent work with molecular rotors, which are a group of fluorescent molecules that could act as biosensors for viscosity due to forming twisted intramolecular charge transfer states upon photoexcitation.