The 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced on the evening of October 7, Beijing time.

The Clarivate Citation Laureates list, compiled by the analytics firm Clarivate, honors researchers with significant academic influence and is often regarded as one of the bellwethers for the Nobel Prize.

According to the latest list published by the company in September, the chemistry field involves three groups of research achievements: precise gene editing, self-assembled monolayers, and long-range electron transfer in proteins.

On October 2, Song Yanlin, a researcher at the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and director of the Key Laboratory of Green Printing, and Jiang Xuefeng, a professor at the School of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering at East China Normal University, each offered their personal predictions on these fields.

Song Yanlin favors the potential impact of precise gene editing, while Jiang Xuefeng leans toward the fundamental scientific value of long-range electron transfer in proteins.

Facing a Nobel Prize full of suspense, Jiang Xuefeng believes the discussion should not stop at guessing whether a particular person will win, but should focus more on what problem a research direction has solved and what it means for human development and real-world needs.

"The Nobel Prize is more about recognizing and affirming a scientific direction, pointing out the evolutionary path of major scientific questions for humanity," he said.

Award decisions are often influenced by multiple comprehensive factors, and while the public can look forward to the results, they also need to calmly and objectively view the differences between predictions and the final outcome.

Precise Gene Editing: Can Clinical Potential Bring Another Prize?

Among the three directions, precise gene editing has the most direct connection to disease treatment.

This year's Citation Laureate in this area, Chinese-American scientist David Liu, is one of the pioneers of precise gene editing.

He is a Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences at Harvard University and a researcher at the Broad Institute, and his laboratory developed base editing and prime editing, enabling direct and precise modification of DNA within living biological systems.

David Ruchien Liu, American molecular biologist and organic chemist. Source: Harvard University website.

To understand precise gene editing technology, one can first imagine a DNA sequence as a text composed of different "letters."

Some genetic diseases arise from a change in one of these letters, or from the deletion or insertion of a fragment.

One of the important goals of gene editing is to accurately correct these disease-causing changes.

Conventional CRISPR-Cas9 editing typically cuts the DNA double strand at the target site and then relies on the cell's repair mechanisms to complete the edit.

In 2016, David Liu's team published research on base editing, which combines a DNA-targeting tool with an enzyme capable of changing bases, allowing specific base conversions to be completed without causing DNA double-strand breaks.

If base editing is like correcting a specific type of "typo," the prime editing approach the team further proposed in 2019 expanded the range of text that can be modified.

Song Yanlin personally favors precise gene editing. He noted that research on self-assembled monolayers began in the 1980s, has a long history, and covers a wide range of applications, whereas precise gene editing can influence the structure and properties of entire organisms at the molecular level, and its significance in future clinical treatment could be broader.

Materials currently published by the Broad Institute show that David Liu alone has at least 28 clinical trials using base editing or prime editing underway, with at least 10 trials having reported results.

The three researchers in the self-assembled monolayer group received the 2026 Citation Laureates award. Source: Clarivate official website.

Jiang Xuefeng also pays attention to the advances of next-generation gene editing in terms of editing methods and precision.

He pointed out that traditional gene editing requires unwinding the DNA double helix for repair and reassembly, which carries the risk of off-target effects, while base editing and prime editing, in principle, do not need to open the overall structure and are expected to be safer.

However, he cautioned that avoiding DNA double-strand breaks does not mean risks such as unintended edits have disappeared.

Whether the technology is safe and can produce stable therapeutic effects still requires experimental and clinical evidence.

In addition, he noted that in 2020, Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer Doudna won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for developing CRISPR gene editing technology.

Only six years since the last related achievement won the prize, it is uncertain whether new progress will again be recognized by the Nobel committee.

Nevertheless, Jiang Xuefeng believes it is not impossible for the same field to win a Nobel Prize again; the key is whether subsequent achievements represent sufficiently important scientific progress and significance for human development.

Long-Range Electron Transfer in Proteins: The Basic Research Jiang Xuefeng Favors More

Jiang Xuefeng personally favors long-range electron transfer in proteins.

Harry Gray and Jay Winkler from Caltech have collaborated for decades, gradually revealing "how proteins achieve long-distance electron exchange," providing key evidence for understanding the physiological functions of proteins and helping the academic community glimpse the internal principles of cellular energy production and transmission.

In Clarivate's official words, their academic contributions have fundamentally changed the working methods in a series of fields, from targeted drug therapy to clean energy production.

Long-range electron transfer in proteins received the 2026 Citation Laureates award. Source: Clarivate.

Jiang Xuefeng used an accessible analogy to explain. Everyday experience easily leads people to believe that transmission requires contact between two parties.

But the research of these two scientists broke the traditional cognition that "electron transfer must require physical contact between two sites."

Using the "quantum tunneling effect" in microscopic quantum physics, electrons can also exhibit counterintuitive behavior similar to "Schr枚dinger's cat" 鈥?that is, electron transfer can still occur between two sites that appear not to be in contact, have a relatively high energy barrier, and are far apart.

The importance of such research lies in helping people understand the fundamental mechanisms in life processes, such as photosynthesis in plants (the mechanism of the light reaction) and numerous photoelectric conduction processes in organisms.

"Considering various comprehensive factors, I think its possibility is somewhat greater. The related achievements not only relate to technological applications but also help people explain how important life processes occur," Jiang Xuefeng said.

Jiang Xuefeng emphasized that the Nobel Prize is unpredictable and that this is only his personal judgment.

Self-Assembled Monolayers: A Single Layer of Molecules Changes a Material's Surface

Another group receiving attention is self-assembled monolayers.

Clarivate officially highlighted three pioneers in self-assembled monolayer research: American scholars David Allara and Ralph Nuzzo, and Jacob Sagiv from Israel.

This year, Allara, Nuzzo, and Sagiv were selected as Citation Laureates for developing self-assembled monolayers.

A self-assembled monolayer refers to a film only one molecule thick that forms spontaneously through interactions between molecules and a solid surface as well as among the molecules themselves.

Researchers can design the composition and terminal groups of the molecules to regulate surface wettability, chemical reactivity, and other interfacial properties.

This is equivalent to giving a material a designable "molecular coat": the bulk material itself may not need to change, but its behavior when in contact with water, other molecules, or adjacent materials can change.

As early as the 1980s, the three laid the foundation for this field, and the related achievements are now widely used, covering coatings, catalysis, and electronic devices.

In 1980, Jacob Sagiv demonstrated that molecules with silane terminal groups could form structurally well-defined, covalently bonded monolayers on oxygen-containing surfaces.

In 1983, Ralph Nuzzo and David Allara further studied the adsorption and ordered assembly of sulfur-containing organic molecules on gold surfaces and analyzed the film structure through spectroscopy and other means.

These works enabled scientists to more systematically study how molecules attach to surfaces, how they arrange themselves, and how molecular structure affects surface properties.

As for whether self-assembled monolayers are likely to win the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Jiang Xuefeng and Song Yanlin were relatively reserved in their judgment.

Song Yanlin mentioned that self-assembled monolayers have continued to develop since the 1980s and have influenced multiple research fields, including perovskite photovoltaic devices.

This connection is also reflected in the work of Chinese research teams.

In 2025, the Institute of Chemistry of the Chinese Academy of Sciences announced that Song Yanlin's research group improved the coverage and uniformity of self-assembled monolayers on substrates through a molecular blending strategy and applied them to perovskite photovoltaic devices.

Such molecular thin films can serve as hole transport materials, affecting charge transport and interfacial losses in devices.

This year's Citation Laureates list is also not the full scope for observing potential research directions for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.

In 2025, Zhang Tao of the Dalian Institute of Chemical Physics of the Chinese Academy of Sciences was selected as a Citation Laureate for his pioneering contributions to single-atom catalysis, becoming the first mainland Chinese scientist to receive this honor.

He and his collaborators proposed the concept of "single-atom catalysis" in 2011, promoting researchers to design and study catalytically active sites at the atomic scale.

Chinese scientists have also made important achievements in chemical biology.

For example, He Chuan, a professor at the University of Chicago, won the 2023 Wolf Prize in Chemistry for discovering reversible RNA methylation and its role in regulating gene expression.