Defect-enhanced activation of carbon nitride/horseradish peroxidase nanohybrids for visible-light-driven photobiocatalytic water purification
By Bian, Jiyong; An, Xiaoqiang; Jiang, Wei; Liu, Ruiping; Hu, Chengzhi; Liu, Huijuan
Published in Chemical Engineering Journal
2020
Abstract
Enzymatic biodegradation offers a powerful tool to remediate the contaminated environments under mild conditions. Unfortunately, its large-scale implementation is restricted by the limited stability of extracellular enzymes. Semi-biological catalysis provides an attractive approach to address the current challenges. In this paper, we report the construction of defect-mediated enzyme-photo nanoarchitectures by coupling ultrathin carbon nitride nanosheets with horseradish peroxidase. We observed the significantly enhanced generation of reactive species over nitrogen-deficient carbon nitride. This abiotic/biotic hybrids not only provided on-demand stimuli for activating horseradish peroxidase into oxidation state, but also exhibited great potential for restraining the undesirable denaturation of extracellular enzymes. The synergistic effect between defect-engineered polymers and biological molecules contributed to the 13.2-fold increased oxidation degradation (0.0327 min−1) of methyl orange (MO) in wastewater compared to pristine carbon nitride (0.0024 min−1). This work opens a new avenue of modulating the enzymatic functionality through defect engineering for high-efficiency photobiocatalytic applications.