Catalysts play a pivotal role in synthetic chemistry.
In living cells, they conduct and control the biosynthetic reactions for sustenance. In industry and in academic laboratories, they accelerate reactions that lead to technologically or biologically important and essential products. The focus of research in the field of catalysis has largely been to obtain selectivity in reaction and in products that are comparable to one of Nature's catalysts, enzymes. Unlike synthetic catalysts, enzymes have a unique and remarkable ability to precisely regulate their catalytic activity. An important question that arises is whether the synthetic catalysts can be designed such that they can regulate the rate of the reaction depending on the concentration of the end-products.