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Updated: Aug 1, 2025
Heterogeneous Removal of Water-Soluble Ruthenium Olefin Metathesis Catalyst from Aqueous Media Via Host-Guest Interaction
Published on: August 23, 2018
Reversible catalysis
Vincent Fourmond1, Nicolas Plumeré2, Christophe Léger3
1Laboratoire de Bioénergétique et Ingénierie des Protéines, CNRS, Aix-Marseille Université, Institut de Microbiologie de la Méditerranée, and Institut Microbiologie, Bioénergies et Biotechnologie, Marseille, France.
Abstract:
We describe as 'reversible' a bidirectional catalyst that allows a reaction to proceed at a significant rate in response to even a small departure from equilibrium, resulting in fast and energy-efficient chemical transformation. Examining the relation between reaction rate and thermodynamic driving force is the basis of electrochemical investigations of redox reactions, which can be catalysed by metallic surfaces and biological or synthetic molecular catalysts. This relation has also been discussed in the context of biological energy transduction, regarding the function of biological molecular machines that harness chemical reactions to do mechanical work. This Perspective describes mean-field kinetic modelling of these three types of systems - surface catalysts, molecular catalysts of redox reactions and molecular machines - with the goal of unifying concepts in these different fields. We emphasize that reversibility should be distinguished from other figures of merit, such as rate or directionality, before its design principles can be identified and used to engineer synthetic catalysts.
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