Biodegradable food packaging materials offer a sustainable alternative to conventional plastics, but their applications are often limited by lower oxygen barrier performance and mechanical strength. Now, Professor Andi Dirpan from Hasanuddin University, along with researchers from India and Malaysia, have developed multilayered polylactic acid films reinforced with microcrystalline cellulose and oxygen scavenger butylated hydroxytoluene. The resulting bioplastic improved oxygen-scavenging functionality with strength, offering the promise of a safe and sustainable solution for food packaging.

A new review study explores natural products containing atypical atoms, including boron, fluorine, arsenic, selenium, iodine, vanadium, and molybdenum. These metabolites reveal how nature’s biosynthetic repertoire extends beyond conventional biological elements, enabling unusual biosynthetic pathways, redox activity, detoxification, signaling, defense, and catalysis. The review highlights their ecological roles and future potential for drug discovery, genome mining, and sustainable biocatalysis.

Controlling interactions between molecules and their functions from the molecular level to the macroscopic scale is challenging in supramolecular chemistry and materials chemistry. To this end, a research team led by Associate Professor Yosuke Tani from WPI-ITbM at Nagoya University and Keisuke Wada from Kyoto University designed a vapor-controlled reversible host–guest chemistry system that controls the optical and physical properties of a functional molecular liquid (FML)—non-volatile fluids that can feature optical, electronic, and catalytic properties. Their research was published in Chemical Science on July 21, 2026.