A small new world: the promise of molecular environmental science

Abstract

Despite all the advances of recent years, we still know surprisingly little about the fate of pollutants in natural environments. Predicting chemical reactions in the laboratory or in a computer model is one thing; actually observing such behaviour in natural systems is quite another. But now new analytical techniques are allowing researchers to peer into real-world systems at a molecular level. In so doing they are helping to build bridges between chemistry and the emerging worlds of nanotechnology and genomics.