No abstract

The fight against the novel coronavirus pneumonia (namely COVID-19) that seriously harms human health is a common task for all mankind. Currently, development of drugs against the novel coronavirus (namely SARS-CoV-2) is quite urgent. Chinese medical workers and scientific researchers have found some drugs to play potential therapeutic effects on COVID-19 at the cellular level or in preliminary clinical trials. However, more fundamental studies and large sample clinical trials need to be done to ensure the efficacy and safety of these drugs. The adoption of these drugs without further testing must be careful. The relevant articles, news, and government reports published on the official and Preprint websites, PubMed and China National Knowledge Infrastructure (CNKI) databases from December 2019 to April 2020 were searched and manually filtered. The general pharmacological characteristics, indications, adverse reactions, general usage, and especially current status of the treatment of COVID-19 of those potentially effective drugs, including chemical drugs, traditional Chinese medicines (TCMs), and biological products in China were summarized in this review to guide reasonable medication and the development of specific drugs for the treatment of COVID-19.

We demonstrate a method to simultaneously immobilize the oxidation catalyst, TEMPO, while dramatically enhancing its electrocatalytic activity toward several biologically available alcohols. TEMPO is covalently immobilized onto linear poly(ethylenimine), which is then cross-linked onto the surface of a glassy carbon electrode to form a hydrogel through which substrates can readily diffuse. The TEMPO-LPEI electrode is used as an anode capable of generating currents from 0.41 ± 0.06 mA cm −2 in the presence of 250 mM sucrose to 8.20 ± 0.04 mA cm −2 in the presence of 2 M methanol and 33.4 ± 9.4 mA cm −2 in the presence of 500 mM formate under neutral pH and at 25°C. The newly described anode is combined with an enzymatic biocathode to construct a hybrid biofuel cell to produce 0.38 ± 0.04 mA cm −2 while using 2 M methanol as a fuel source.

In recent years, there has been a substantial increase in the research of plasmonic effects in catalysis motivated by the enhanced surface reactivity that can be achieved using resonant optical fields confined on the nanoscale. However, these plasmonic materials have not been extended to electrocatalysis applications. In this paper, we demonstrate the fabrication, modeling and characterization of gold (Au) nanofiber-based electrodes for plasmonic enhanced electrocatalysis of ethanol and methanol in alkaline media. By combining light scattering and electrochemical measurements with computational electromagnetic field design, we show that the resonant excitations of plasmon modes in Au nanofibers can significantly increase the activity of electrocatalytic reactions at electrode surfaces by preventing their passivation. In particular, our results demonstrate higher performance and stability of the alcohol electrocatalysts in sodium hydroxide solutions. The fabrication of "plasmonic electrodes" using the facile, inexpensive and environmentally friendly electrospinning technology provides unique opportunities to engineer novel light-enhanced electrodes over large surface areas for applications to fuel cells, electrofuels, and other electrolysis systems. Electrocatalysis is critical to the function of both anodes and cathodes in fuel cells, electrolyzers, electrofuels, and electrosynthesis systems. Over the last two decades, there has been a great deal of research studying nanostructured materials for improved electrocatalysis [1][2][3][4][5] and photocatalysis (i.e. water splitting).6-9 These studies have shown that structure can affect catalytic activity in electrocatalytic systems and have resulted in the synthesis of a wide variety of electrocatalytic nanoparticles, but these systems have focused on electrocatalysis in dark reactors, since the design of current fuel cells and electrolyzers are flow-through systems that make incorporation of light difficult. Therefore, there is a wealth of information on the structure/activity relationship for electrocatalysis in the absence of light, but there have been only limited investigations on the role of light-induced resonant phenomena in electrocatalysis.Recently, there has been a substantial amount of research interest in utilizing light to enhance photocatalysis/photoelectrocatalysis using plasmonically enhanced electromagnetic fields.10-13 These studies have utilized photocatalysts and photoelectrocatalysts that support plasmonic resonances, so that the photocatalyst give rise to opticallyinduced localized surface plasmons and hot electrons.14,15 Hot electrons are accompanied by large electric fields, can form charge carrier pairs or transfer to adsorbates on the surface, thus altering the activation energy for the photocatalytic reaction. Similar effects are expected in principle to be beneficial also for electrocatalysis that do not require light for catalytic function. However, large surface area electrodes are difficult to fabricate using traditional plasmonic nan...

Direct alcohol fuel cells have attracted interest as an alternative energy conversion device, but most systems use either methanol or ethanol. Glycerol, a chemical byproduct of biodiesel production, is a more desirable fuel, because it is safer and has a higher energy density. With this aim, binary Ag−Au plasmonic nanoparticles (NPs) were immobilized onto electrodes and evaluated in a glycerol fuel cell. When illuminated with visible light, the power output of the fuel cell increased 100 %. The output at varying wavelengths and light intensities indicates that the enhanced oxidation was related to the catalyst's plasmonic properties. Cyclic voltammetry (CV) showed that the surface plasmon resonance (SPR) of the catalyst did not cause heating at the electrode surface, so the enhancement must be a result of either hot electron transfer or breakdown of the fuel into simpler molecules by photogenerated reactive oxygen species. This is the first report of the photoelectrocatalytic oxidation of a complex alcohol fuel by a plasmonic material.