Biomass is a sustainable material derived from plants or waste from animals, which has been developed as a promising feedstock for producing various value-added chemicals and biofuels. Due to the oxygen-rich features of biomass sources, the yielded products are typically functionalized with oxygen-containing species such as hydroxy, ether, carbonyl, carboxyl, and ester groups, which additionally significantly enrich the product variety.

In addition to oxygen species, catalytic functionalization of biomass derivatives with nitrogen, sulphur, phosphorus, and silicon atoms can also be achieved via specific reaction routes or pathways. Those heteroatom-containing compounds are crucial core scaffolds or key intermediates in a wide range of bioactive molecules and functional materials and can also be directly used as solvents, surfactants, and so on. However, due to the inherent structural complexity of biomass materials with high oxygen content and rich active species, multistep conversion routes are typically involved in order to gain specific heteroatom-containing products. Among the developed catalytic strategies, C-X (X = O, N, S, P, Si, C) coupling (e.g., etherification/esterification, amination, thiation, phosphorylation, silylation, and Aldol reactions) is a key approach to synthesizing organic compounds with satisfactory functional groups and biological activities. To keep this value chain, there is a special emphasis on designing appropriate catalytic materials/molecules with controllable functionalities or the establishment of fitting catalytic processes.

This special issue intends to highlight current progress on the development and optimization of catalytic strategies and systems for the selective conversion of lignocellulosic biomass and its derivatives such as organic acids, furanic compounds, aldehydes/ketones, and alcohols to value-added heteroatom-containing products. Manuscripts submitted should present novel approaches (original research articles) and recent advances (review articles) on the application of new and green technologies to accomplish C-X coupling for biomass valorisation. We particularly encourage submission of manuscripts focusing on the preparation of functional catalytic materials or molecules and on the use of correlated auxiliaries to boost reaction rate and selectivity in the production process.

Potential topics include but are not limited to the following:

• The synthesis of biomass-derived organic acids into heteroatom-containing products
• Furanic compounds from biomass sources for the selective conversion into value-added heteroatom-containing products
• Biomass-derived platform molecules and their applications
• C-X (X = O, N, S, P, Si, C) coupling reactions using biomass sources
• Design of functional catalytic materials or molecules for the selective conversions of biomass materials into value-added hetero-atom compounds
• Synthesis of value-added heteroatom-containing compounds from biomass materials
• Catalytic reaction engineering or chemical engineering for biorefinery for creating biomass starting products
• Green solvents (supercritical fluids, water, and ionic liquids) to increase reaction speed or yield in the synthesis of heteroatom-containing compounds from biomass