Micelles—the meeting place boosting reactions and interactions

The occurrence of chemical reactions between like-charged compounds in aqueous solutions is very slow since particles repel each other. A recent breakthrough published in Nature Communications shows a new way to control chemical reactions by charge neutralization and increase in effective concentrations of reactants. The joint research teams led by prof. Robert Hołyst from the Institute of Physical Chemistry, Polish Academy of Sciences, discovered that using compounds with a large surface charge density speed up the reactions up to 5-million fold.