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Biomimetic active sites on monolayered metal–organic frameworks for artificial photosynthesis

Nature Catalysis volume 5, pages 1006–1018 (2022)Cite this article

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Abstract

Enzymes have evolved to catalyse challenging chemical transformations with high efficiency and selectivity. Although a number of artificial systems have been developed to recapitulate the catalytic activity of natural enzymes, they are mostly limited to catalysing relatively simple reactions owing to their ability to mimic only the active metal centres of natural enzymes, without incorporating the proximal amino acids or cofactors. Here we report a metal–organic framework-based artificial enzyme (metal–organic–zyme, MOZ) by integrating active metal centres, proximal amino acids and other cofactors into a tunable metal–organic framework monolayer. We design two libraries of MOZs to perform photocatalytic CO2 reduction and water oxidation reactions. Through tuning the incorporated amino acids in the MOZs, we systematically optimize the activity and selectivity of these libraries. Combining these optimized MOZs into a single system realizes complete artificial photosynthesis in the reaction of (1 + n)CO2 + 2H2O → CH4 + nCO + (2 + n/2)O2.

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Fig. 1: Design of MOZs.
Fig. 2: MOZ construction and optimization for CO2RR.
Fig. 3: Characterization of MOZs.
Fig. 4: Photocatalytic CO2RR by MOZs.
Fig. 5: Photocatalytic WOR by MOZs.
Fig. 6: Artificial photosynthesis by MOZs.

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Data availability

Data relating to the characterization data of materials, detection of products, mechanistic studies, computational studies and NMR spectra are available in the Supplementary Information. Crystallographic data for the structures reported in this article have been deposited at the Cambridge Crystallographic Data Centre, under deposition numbers CCDC 2000080 (Ur). Copies of the data can be obtained free of charge via https://www.ccdc.cam.ac.uk/structures/. Cartesian coordinates of optimized structures are available in Supplementary Data 1. All additional data are available from the authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We thank F. Shi for help with scanning transmission electron microscopy. This work made use of Instruments in the Electron Microscopy Core (Research Resources Center, University of Illinois at Chicago). We thank G. Zhang, X. Jiang, C. Wang and F. Shi for helpful discussions. This work was supported by the University of Chicago and National Science Foundation (CHE-2102554). W.S. acknowledges financial support from the China Scholarship Council. Single-crystal diffraction studies were performed at ChemMatCARS, APS, ANL. ChemMatCARS is principally supported by the Divisions of Chemistry (CHE) and Materials Research (DMR), National Science Foundation, under grant NSF/CHE-1346572. Use of the Advanced Photon Source, an Office of Science User Facility operated for the US Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science by Argonne National Laboratory, was supported by the US DOE under contract DE-AC02-06CH11357.

Author information

Author notes

  1. Wenjie Shi

    Present address: MOE International Joint Laboratory of Materials Microstructure, Institute for New Energy Materials and Low Carbon Technologies, School of Materials Science and Engineering, Tianjin University of Technology, Tianjin, China

  2. These authors contributed equally: Guangxu Lan, Yingjie Fan, Wenjie Shi.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Chemistry, The University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA

    Guangxu Lan, Yingjie Fan, Wenjie Shi, Eric You, Samuel S. Veroneau & Wenbin Lin

  2. College of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Xiamen University, Xiamen, China

    Wenjie Shi

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Contributions

G.L., Y.F., W.S., S.S.V. and W.L. conceived the idea and designed the project. W.L. directed and supervised the research. G.L., Y.F. and E.Y. performed the experimental works. W.S. performed the computational works. G.L., Y.F., W.S., S.S.V. and W.L. wrote the paper, with input from all other co-authors.

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Correspondence to Wenbin Lin.

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Nature Catalysis thanks Jun Cheng and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary information

Supplementary Information

Supplementary Methods, Notes 1–16, Figs. 1–30, Tables 1–4, NMR spectra and refs.

Supplementary Data 1

Cartesian coordinates of optimized structures.

Supplementary Data 2

Crystal structure of Ur.

Supplementary Data 3

Structure factor of Ur.

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Lan, G., Fan, Y., Shi, W. et al. Biomimetic active sites on monolayered metal–organic frameworks for artificial photosynthesis. Nat Catal 5, 1006–1018 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41929-022-00865-5

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