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In this issue of PNAS, Schoonheydt, Solomon, and coworkers (1) definitively characterize the structure of the Cu-ZSM-5 site that oxidizes methane to methanol. With the successful correlation of a specific copper-oxy structure to such reactivity, the importance of this work extends beyond hydrocarbon oxidation on zeolites. This breakthrough potentially has far-reaching implications in both the fundamental and applied sciences.
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Himes et al. (2009) studied this question.
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