Cost-intensive environmental protection

Morrison 1989). Cost-intensive environmental protection and even medical diagnosis and therapy of patients may be impacted without sufficient quality - and/or reliability - of analytical speciation data. 

It was emphasized in the past that the development of catalysis was the result of a sort of push-pull interaction. Catalysis is crucial for modern chemical industry, and contacts between laboratories and industry are generally intense. The problems industry is faced with can stimulate (or should stimulate more) research in Academia (the pull effect). On the other hand, new ideas and discoveries in Academia are one (modest) factor that contributes to push innovations in industry. Stronger incentives to innovations result from the considerable influence that energy and raw materials cost, environmental protection, sustainability in general, and profitability exert on industrial developments. Catalyst preparation is one aspect of catalysis where this push-pull effect has, or should have, a particularly strong influence. The present contribution, inspired by the Promising Scientific Avenues challenge, will therefore attempt to be close to the spirit of the symposium title. 

Nature created multienzymatic systems to accomplish extremely efficient one-pot tandem catalysis. As in an assembly line, tens of enzymes are well organised to transform simple materials to complex molecules with perfect control of selectivity hy a series of coupled reactions in the cell. It has long been chemists endeavor to extend such coordinated catalytic action to artificial processes to make synthetic chemistry more sustainable. Nowadays, owing to the resource-intensive nature of the current synthetic industry, the development of tandem one-pot reactions, avoiding the use of costly and time-consuming protection-deprotection processes as well as purification procedures of intermediates, has become especially important and valuable because society is confronted with bottle-neck problems such as energy and time shortage and environmental pollution. 

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