Topics soon to be featured include: light detection and ranging (Lidar), cryo-electron tomography, and laser-capture microdissection.Stay tuned for a special 5-year Anniversary issue in January 2026 featuring a variety of Comments and Q&As!

Protein film electrochemistry quantitatively assesses redox properties of biomolecular monolayer films on electrodes, enabling insights into thermodynamics and kinetics of ligand interactions and catalysis, This Primer highlights applications in biosensors, energy conversion, and enzyme mechanisms.

What does it mean for a reaction to be "green"? Our latest comment discusses a variety of green chemistry metrics and initiatives for designing future sustainable reactions.

This Primer discusses key principles and experiments in quantitative ultraviolet–visible spectroelectrochemistry experiments with a focus on data-rich set-ups. The authors demonstrate the various data outputs of these experiments using worked examples and discuss the practical applications of quantitative ultraviolet–visible spectroelectrochemistry in the study of energy materials.

Frontal polymerization is a self-sustaining, energy-efficient technique for rapidly converting monomers into polymers. This Primer explores frontal polymerization mechanisms, experimental set-up, applications and future directions, offering practical guidance for researchers and highlighting its potential for the design of sustainable, high-performance materials.

Ptychography computationally reconstructs high-resolution images from overlapping diffraction patterns, recovering both amplitude and phase information. This Primer covers the technique’s principles, diverse wavelength implementations from optical to electron regimes, advanced reconstruction strategies and applications ranging from live cell imaging to atomic-resolution materials characterization.

Atomic layer deposition is a surface-controlled chemical vapour deposition method that — depositing materials one atomic layer at the time — grants a high degree of control on the film thickness. This technique can be used to obtain high-quality films with remarkable conformity and uniformity.

This Primer offers a practical and rational introduction to macromolecular crystallography, whether to engage directly with or to critically assess results, with a focus on understanding the diffraction data, solving the phase problem, building and refining the atomic model, and interpreting the resulting atomic structure.

Laser-driven ultrafast tranmission electron microscopy (UTEM) approaches such as stroboscopic UTEM enable the study of ultrafast reversible processes at time resolutions at the femtosecond scale and beyond. This Primer focuses on stroboscopic UTEM, describing its experimental set-up and variants, and covers the various applications of this technique in condensed matter physics, including imaging structural dynamics, photo-induced near-field electron microscopy, attosecond-scale imaging, dark-field imaging and beyond.