Prebiotic formation of enantiomeric excess D-amino acids on natural pyrite.

D-amino acids, found in excess in a minority of organisms and crucial for marine invertebrates, contrast with the more common L-amino acids in most life forms. The local prebiotic origin of D-amino acid enantiomeric excess in natural systems remains an unsolved conundrum. Herein, we demonstrate the formation of enantiomeric excess (ee) D-amino acids through photocatalytic reductive amination of α-keto acids on natural pyrite.

Chiral Nanostructured Ag Films for Multicarbon Products from CO Electroreduction.

The formation of multicarbon products from CO electroreduction is challenging on materials other than Cu-based catalysts. Ag has been known to be a typical metal catalyst, producing CO in CO electroreduction. The formation of C products by Ag has never been reported because the carbon-carbon (C-C) coupling is an unfavorable process due to the high reaction barrier energy of *OCCO.

DNA-Assisted Creation of a Library of Ultrasmall Multimetal/Metal Oxide Nanoparticles Confined in Silica.

Supported ultrasmall metal/metal oxide nanoparticles (UMNPs) with sizes in the range of 1-5 nm exhibit unique properties in sensing, catalysis, biomedicine, etc. However, the metal-support and metal-metal precursor interactions were not as well controlled to stabilize the metal nanoparticles on/in the supports. Herein, DNA is chosen as a template and a ligand for the silica-supported UMNPs, taking full use of its binding ability to metal ions via either electrostatic or coordination interactions.

The Z-scheme transfer of photogenerated electrons for CO photocatalytic reduction over g-ZnO/2H-MoS heterostructure.

Effective separation of the photogenerated electrons and holes is critical to improve photocatalytic efficiency. To achieve this, we design a Z-scheme g-ZnO/2H-MoS heterostructure to spatially separate the photogenerated carriers promoting the reduction of CO on the surface of the heterostructure, through density functional theory (DFT) calculations. The g-ZnO/2H-MoS heterostructure has a narrow band gap, which is beneficial to speed up the transport of carriers.

Cobalt-based ZIF coordinated hybrids with defective TiO for boosting visible light-driven photo-Fenton-like degradation of bisphenol A.

Designing heterostructure of photocatalyst as an efficient approach to boost visible light-driven photocatalytic degradation, we prepared a series of cobalt-based ZIF coordinated with defective TiO, denoted as B-TiO@ZIF-67 composites, through wrapping defective B-TiO on ZIF-67 for promoting photocatalytic degradation efficiency of biphenyl A. The B-TiO@ZIF-67 composites displayed superior photocatalytic performance to pure TiO or ZIF-67 because of faster separation of photogenerated charge carriers and more suitable redox potentials. Such a novel photo-Fenton-like system composed of B-TiO@ZIF-67/HO/visible light accelerated the peroxidative degradation of biphenyl An up to a removal efficiency of 95.

DFT study on Ag loaded 2H-MoS for understanding the mechanism of improved photocatalytic reduction of CO.

Transition metal modified molybdenum disulfide to improve the performance of photocatalytic reduction of carbon dioxide has been receiving much attention. Herein, a novel high-efficiency photocatalytic composite Ag/2H-MoS2 has been constructed and simulated using density functional theory (DFT) for unveiling the mechanism of improved photocatalytic reduction of CO2 in our experimental research. Our calculations about the band structure and electronic and optical properties indicate that the loading of Ag atoms enhances the photocatalytic performance of 2H-MoS2 nanosheets by transferring the photogenerated electrons from the valence band of 2H-MoS2 to the loaded Ag atoms.