Modern development of chemical manufacturing requires a substantial reduction in energy consumption and catalyst cost. Sunlight-driven chemical transformation by metal oxides holds great promise for this goal; however, it remains a grand challenge to efficiently couple solar energy into many catalytic reactions. Here we report that defect engineering on oxide catalyst can serve as a versatile approach to bridge light harvesting with surface reactions by ensuring species chemisorption. The chemisorption not only spatially enables the transfer of photoexcited electrons to reaction species, but also alters the form of active species to lower the photon energy requirement for reactions. In a proof of concept, oxygen molecules are activated into superoxide radicals on defect-rich tungsten oxide through visible-near-infrared illumination to trigger organic aerobic couplings of amines to corresponding imines. The excellent efficiency and durability for such a highly important process in chemical transformation can otherwise be virtually impossible to attain by counterpart materials.

All-electronic DNA biosensors based on graphene field-effect transistors (GFETs) offer the prospect of simple and cost-effective diagnostics. For GFET sensors based on complementary probe DNA, the sensitivity is limited by the binding affinity of the target oligonucleotide, in the nM range for 20 mer targets. We report a ∼20 000× improvement in sensitivity through the use of engineered hairpin probe DNA that allows for target recycling and hybridization chain reaction. This enables detection of 21 mer target DNA at sub-fM concentration and provides superior specificity against single-base mismatched oligomers. The work is based on a scalable fabrication process for biosensor arrays that is suitable for multiplexed detection. This approach overcomes the binding-affinity-dependent sensitivity of nucleic acid biosensors and offers a pathway toward multiplexed and label-free nucleic acid testing with high accuracy and selectivity.

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