The growing demand for new, sophisticated, multifunctional materials has brought natural structural composites into focus, since they underwent a substantial optimization during long evolutionary selection pressure and adaptation processes. Marine biological materials are the most important sources of both inspiration for biomimetics and of raw materials for practical applications in technology and biomedicine. The use of marine natural products as multifunctional biomaterials is currently undergoing a renaissance in the modern materials science. The diversity of marine biomaterials, their forms and fields of application are highlighted in this review. We will discuss the challenges, solutions, and future directions of modern marine biomaterialogy using a thorough analysis of scientific sources over the past ten years.

Under non-equilibrium conditions, liquid droplets coupled to their environment by sustained flows of matter and/or energy can become “active” systems capable of various life-like functions. When “fueled” by even simple chemical reactions, such droplets can become tactic and can perform “intelligent” tasks such as maze solving. With more complex chemistries, droplets can support basic forms of metabolism, grow, self-replicate, and exhibit evolutionary changes akin to biological cells. There are also first exciting examples of active droplets connected into larger, tissue-like systems supporting droplet-to-droplet communication, and giving rise to collective material properties. As practical applications of droplets also begin to appear (e.g., in single-cell diagnostics, new methods of electricity generation, optofluidics, or sensors), it appears timely to review and systematize progress in this highly interdisciplinary area of chemical research, and also think about the avenues (and the roadblocks) for future work.

Robotic platforms for chemistry are developing rapidly but most systems are not currently able to adapt to changing circumstances in real-time. We present a dynamically programmable system capable of making, optimizing, and discovering new molecules which utilizes seven sensors that continuously monitor the reaction. By developing a dynamic programming language, we demonstrate the 10-fold scale-up of a highly exothermic oxidation reaction, end point detection, as well as detecting critical hardware failures. We also show how the use of in-line spectroscopy such as HPLC, Raman, and NMR can be used for closed-loop optimization of reactions, exemplified using Van Leusen oxazole synthesis, a four-component Ugi condensation and manganese-catalysed epoxidation reactions, as well as two previously unreported reactions, discovered from a selected chemical space, providing up to 50% yield improvement over 25–50 iterations. Finally, we demonstrate an experimental pipeline to explore a trifluoromethylations reaction space, that discovers new molecules.