CHON: artificial enzyme catalyst
2021.05.24 – Ian Page
Nature’s catalysts are usually enzymes, and for many key pathways these involve single atoms of iron (or small clusters) surrounded with a few nitrogen or phosphorous atoms locked in to very a specific structure, surrounded by piles of organic protein scaffolding that also guides the reactants to the reacting center.
These are very complicated structures, and it’s not clear which bits are critical and which are just evolutionary debris.
The problem is that these enzymes often do things in cells that chemists can’t replicate without rare metals and extreme conditions, yet they are also easily destroyed in use.
Nature probably uses iron because it was easy to find in volcanic vents or wherever life started and has tuned it over the millennia to be remarkably effective at catalyzing all sorts of critical reactions.
This paper is particularly exciting because it replicates the environment of the iron atom in a natural enzyme, within what looks like a robust fairly straightforward 2d graphene like structure, achieving enzyme like rates of activity, but with a potentially much more resilient structure.
The specifics of the application are not relevant, the approach of just picking out the bit of an enzyme that does the business and fixing it in a easily built scaffold is what i find exiting as it’s a useful addition to the domain of biomimetics (finding things that nature does well and replicating them in an engineering framework.). It’s not unique but the diagram is unusually clear!
(And I like the word nanozyme)
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