Engineering catalytic sites at the atomic level provides an opportunity to understand the catalyst’s active sites, which is vital to the development of improved catalysts. Here we show a reliable and tunable polyoxometalate template-based synthetic strategy to atomically engineer metal doping sites onto metallic 1T-MoS 2 , using Anderson-type polyoxometalates as precursors. Benefiting from engineering nickel and oxygen atoms, the optimized electrocatalyst shows great enhancement in the hydrogen evolution reaction with a positive onset potential of ~ 0 V and a low overpotential of −46 mV in alkaline electrolyte, comparable to platinum-based catalysts. First-principles calculations reveal co-doping nickel and oxygen into 1T-MoS 2 assists the process of water dissociation and hydrogen generation from their intermediate states. This research will expand on the ability to improve the activities of various catalysts by precisely engineering atomic activation sites to achieve significant electronic modulations and improve atomic utilization efficiencies.

In this article, we report the synthesis of bifunctional Au-Fe(3)O(4) nanoparticles that are formed by chemical bond linkage. Due to the introduction of Au nanoparticles, the resulting bifunctional Au-Fe(3)O(4) nanoparticles can be easily modified with other functional molecules to realize various nanobiotechnological separations and detections. Here, as an example, we demonstrate that as-prepared Au-Fe(3)O(4) nanoparticles can be modified with nitrilotriacetic acid molecules through Au-S interaction and used to separate proteins simply with the assistance of a magnet. Bradford protein assay and sodium dodecyl sulfate-polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis were performed to examine the validity of the separation procedure, and the phosphate determination method suggested that the as-separated protein maintained catalytic activity. This result shows the efficiency of such a material in protein separation and suggests that its use can be extended to magnetic separation of other biosubstances. Moreover, this synthetic strategy paves the way for facile preparation of diverse bifunctional and even multifunctional nanomaterials.

No abstract

No abstract