No abstract

Nature has created innumerable life forms with miraculous hierarchical structures and morphologies that are optimized for different life events through evolution over billions of years. Bicontinuous cubic structures, which are often described by triply periodic minimal surfaces (TPMSs) and their constant mean curvature (CMC)/parallel surface companions, are of special interest to various research fields because of their complex form with unique physical functionalities. This has prompted the scientific community to fully understand the formation, structure, and properties of these materials. In this review, we summarize and discuss the formation mechanism and relationships of the relevant biological structures and the artificial self-assembly systems. These structures can be formed through biological processes with amazing regulation across a great length scales; nevertheless, artificial construction normally produces the structure corresponding to the molecular size and shape. Notably, the block copolymeric system is considered to be an applicable and attractive model system for the study of biological systems due to their versatile design and rich phase behavior. Some of the phenomena found in these two systems are compared and discussed, and this information may provide new ideas for a comprehensive understanding of the relationship between molecular shape and resulting interface curvature and the selfassembly process in living organisms. We argue that the copolymeric system may serve as a model to understand these biological systems and could encourage additional studies of artificial self-assembly and the creation of new functional materials.

Silica cubosomes were synthesized using a silica precursor and its formation mechanism was revealed.

Exposing active sites and optimizing their binding strength to reaction intermediates are two essential strategies to significantly improve the catalytic performance of 2D materials. However, pursuing an efficient way to achieve these goals simultaneously remains a considerable challenge. Here, using 2D PtTe2 van der Waals material with a well‐defined crystal structure and atomically thin thickness as a model catalyst, it is observed that a moderate calcination strategy can promote the structural transformation of 2D crystal PtTe2 nanosheets (c‐PtTe2 NSs) into oxygen‐doped 2D amorphous PtTe2 NSs (a‐PtTe2 NSs). The experimental and theoretical investigations cooperatively reveal that oxygen dopants can break the inherent Pt‐Te covalent bond in c‐PtTe2 NSs, thereby triggering the reconfiguration of interlayer Pt atoms and exposing them thoroughly. Meanwhile, the structural transformation can effectively tailor the electronic properties (e.g., the density of state near the Fermi level, d‐band center, and conductivity) of Pt active sites via the hybridization of Pt 5d orbitals and O 2p orbitals. As a result, a‐PtTe2 NSs with large amounts of exposed Pt active sites and optimized binding strength to hydrogen intermediates exhibit excellent activity and stability in hydrogen evolution reaction.

Biological scaffolds with hyperbolic surfaces, especially single gyroid and single-diamond structures, have sparked immense interest for creating novel materials due to their extraordinary physical properties. However, the ability of nature to create these unbalanced surfaces has not been achieved in either lyotropic liquid crystals or block copolymer phases due to their thermodynamical instability in these systems. Here, we report the synthesis of a porous silica scaffold with a single-diamond-surface structure fabricated by self-assembly of the poly(ethylene oxide)-b-polystyrene-bpoly(l-lactide) and silica precursors in a mixed solvent of tetrahydrofuran and water. The single-diamond structure with tetrahedral interconnected frameworks was revealed by the electron crystallographic reconstruction. We assume that the formation of single networks is induced by the structural transition and related to the energetic change due to the fluctuations of the Gaussian curvature. This work may provide new insights into these biologically relevant surfaces and related self-assembly systems.