The Latest Findings of Nanozyme Study in Chem by Prof. Xiaoqiang Cui’s Group

Nanozymes are promising alternatives to natural enzymes, but their use remains limited by poor specificity. Overcoming this and controlling the targeted enzyme-like performance of traditional nanozymes is extremely challenging due to the intrinsic structural complexity of these systems.

Recently, Xiaoqiang Cui, Jingxiang Zhao, and co-authors successfully demonstrate that the peroxidase-like specificity is well regulated by the coordination numbers of single Mo sites. The resulting Mo_SA-N₃-C catalyst shows exclusive peroxidase-like behavior. It achieves this via a homolytic pathway, while Mo_SA-N₂-C and Mo_SA-N₄-C catalysts have a different heterolytic pathway. The mechanism of this coordination number-dependent enzymatic specificity is attributed to geometrical structure differences and orientation relationships of the frontier molecular orbitals toward these Mo_SA-N_x-C peroxidase mimics. This study demonstrates rational design of peroxidase-specific nanozymes and precise regulation of their enzymatic properties.

This work was financially supported by the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2016YFA0200400), the Jilin Province Science and Technology Development Program (20190201233JC), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (51571100 and 51872116). We thank the beamline 1W1B in Beijing Synchrotron Radiation Facility (BSRF) and the soft X-ray beamline at the Australian Synchrotron, Victoria, Australia for the help of XAS measurements.

This work can be checked out by this link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2451929420305441?via%3Dihub

Xiaoqiang Cui has achieved his PhD from Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry, Chinese Academy of Sciences (2002) under the supervision of Academician Xiurong Yang. He subsequently joined Prof. Changming Li’s group (2005) as a postdoctoral research fellow at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore and then worked as a research staff (2008) at National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST), Japan. Now he is a Changbai Mountain Scholars Professor and Deputy Dean at School of Materials Science and Engineering, Jilin University. His current research interests focus on the design of 2D nanomaterials for efficient electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, and beyond.

Email: xqcui@jlu.edu.cn; Tel & Fax: +86-431-85155279

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