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Noble metal electrocatalysts (e.g., Pt, Ru, etc.) suffer from sluggish kinetics of water dissociation for the electrochemical reduction of water to molecular hydrogen in alkaline and neutral pH environments. Herein, we found that an integration of Ru nanoparticles (NPs) on oxygen-deficient WO 3-x manifested a 24.0-fold increase in hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) activity compared with commercial Ru/C electrocatalyst in neutral electrolyte. Oxygen-deficient WO 3-x is shown to possess large capacity for storing protons, which could be transferred to the Ru NPs under cathodic potential. This significantly increases the hydrogen coverage on the surface of Ru NPs in HER and thus changes the rate-determining step of HER on Ru from water dissociation to hydrogen recombination. While water splitting electrolysis offers an appealing means to produce H 2 fuel, catalysts show sluggish reaction rate in neutral media. Here, authors utilize hydrogen spillover from oxygen-deficient tungsten oxides to Ru nanoparticles to boost the neutral-pH H 2 evolution performances.

Highlights The effects of the size structure and stability of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) on proton conduction are comprehensively summarized. Advanced strategies for constructing proton conduction MOFs are critically discussed. Challenges and opportunities for the development of novel proton-conducting MOFs are further outlined. Proton-conducting materials have attracted considerable interest because of their extensive application in energy storage and conversion devices. Among them, metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) present tremendous development potential and possibilities for constructing novel advanced proton conductors due to their special advantages in crystallinity, designability, and porosity. In particular, several special design strategies for the structure of MOFs have opened new doors for the advancement of MOF proton conductors, such as charged network construction, ligand functionalization, metal-center manipulation, defective engineering, guest molecule incorporation, and pore-space manipulation. With the implementation of these strategies, proton-conducting MOFs have developed significantly and profoundly within the last decade. Therefore, in this review, we critically discuss and analyze the fundamental principles, design strategies, and implementation methods targeted at improving the proton conductivity of MOFs through representative examples. Besides, the structural features, the proton conduction mechanism and the behavior of MOFs are discussed thoroughly and meticulously. Future endeavors are also proposed to address the challenges of proton-conducting MOFs in practical research. We sincerely expect that this review will bring guidance and inspiration for the design of proton-conducting MOFs and further motivate the research enthusiasm for novel proton-conducting materials.

Seawater electrolysis offers a renewable, scalable, and economic means for green hydrogen production. However, anode corrosion by Cl - pose great challenges for its commercialization. Herein, different from conventional catalysts designed to repel Cl - adsorption, we develop an atomic Ir catalyst on cobalt iron layered double hydroxide (Ir/CoFe-LDH) to tailor Cl - adsorption and modulate the electronic structure of the Ir active center, thereby establishing a unique Ir-OH/Cl coordination for alkaline seawater electrolysis. Operando characterizations and theoretical calculations unveil the pivotal role of this coordination state to lower OER activation energy by a factor of 1.93. The Ir/CoFe-LDH exhibits a remarkable oxygen evolution reaction activity (202 mV overpotential and TOF = 7.46 O 2 s −1 ) in 6 M NaOH+2.8 M NaCl, superior over Cl - -free 6 M NaOH electrolyte (236 mV overpotential and TOF = 1.05 O 2 s −1 ), with 100% catalytic selectivity and stability at high current densities (400-800 mA cm −2 ) for more than 1,000 h. The seawater oxidation reaction faces challenges from competitive chloride oxidation reaction. Herein, the authors have utilized chlorine adsorption to modulate the single-atom Ir coordination state and promote seawater oxidation and catalyst stability.

Electrochemical carbon dioxide/carbon monoxide reduction reaction offers a promising route to synthesize fuels and value-added chemicals, unfortunately their activities and selectivities remain unsatisfactory. Here, we present a general surface molecular tuning strategy by modifying Cu 2 O with a molecular pyridine-derivative. The surface modified Cu 2 O nanocubes by 4-mercaptopyridine display a high Faradaic efficiency of greater than 60% in electrochemical carbon monoxide reduction reaction to acetate with a current density as large as 380 mA/cm 2 in a liquid electrolyte flow cell. In-situ attenuated total reflectance surface-enhanced infrared absorption spectroscopy reveals stronger *CO signal with bridge configuration and stronger *OCCHO signal over modified Cu 2 O nanocubes by 4-mercaptopyridine than unmodified Cu 2 O nanocubes during electrochemical CO reduction. Density function theory calculations disclose that local molecular tuning can effectively regulate the electronic structure of copper catalyst, enhancing *CO and *CHO intermediates adsorption by the stabilization effect through hydrogen bonding, which can greatly promote asymmetric *CO-*CHO coupling in electrochemical carbon monoxide reduction reaction. This work presents a general surface molecular tuning strategy to promote the electrochemical reduction of CO.

Lithium batteries with Si, Al or Bi microsized (>10 µm) particle anodes promise a high capacity, ease of production, low cost and low environmental impact, yet they suffer from fast degradation and a low Coulombic efficiency. Here we demonstrate that a rationally designed electrolyte (2.0 M LiPF 6 in 1:1 v/v mixture of tetrahydrofuran and 2-methyltetrahydrofuran) enables 100 cycles of full cells that contain microsized Si, Al and Bi anodes with commercial LiFePO 4 and LiNi 0.8 Co 0.15 Al 0.05 O 2 cathodes. Alloy anodes with areal capacities of more than 2.5 mAh cm −2 achieved >300 cycles with a high initial Coulombic efficiency of >90% and average Coulombic efficiency of >99.9%. These improvements are facilitated by the formation of a high-modulus LiF–organic bilayer interphase, in which LiF possesses a high interfacial energy with the alloy anode to accommodate plastic deformation of the lithiated alloy during cycling. This work provides a simple yet practical solution to current battery technology without any binder modification or special fabrication methods. Chunsheng Wang and colleagues develop an electrolyte strategy to enable the use of commercially available microsized alloys, such as Si–Li, as high-performance battery anodes. They ascribe its success to the formation of robust LiF-rich layers as the solid–electrolyte interface.

Although the functions of carotenogenic genes are well documented, little is known about the mechanisms that regulate their expression, especially those genes involved in α- and β-branch carotenoid metabolism. In this study, an R2R3-MYB transcriptional factor (CrMYB68) that directly regulates the transformation of α- and β-branch carotenoids was identified using Green Ougan (MT), a stay-green mutant of Citrus reticulata cv Suavissima. A comprehensive analysis of developing and harvested fruits indicated that reduced expression of β-carotene hydroxylases 2 (CrBCH2) and 9-cis-epoxycarotenoid dioxygenase 5 (CrNCED5) was responsible for the delay in the transformation of α- and β-carotene and the biosynthesis of ABA. Additionally, the expression of these genes was negatively correlated with the expression of CrMYB68 in MT. Further, electrophoretic mobility shift assays (EMSAs) and dual luciferase assays indicated that CrMYB68 can directly and negatively regulate CrBCH2 and CrNCED5. Moreover, transient overexpression experiments using leaves of Nicotiana benthamiana indicated that CrMYB68 can also negatively regulate NbBCH2 and NbNCED5. To overcome the difficulty of transgenic validation, we quantified the concentrations of carotenoids and ABA, and gene expression in a revertant of MT. The results of these experiments provide more evidence that CrMYB68 is an important regulator of carotenoid metabolism.

The drug development process consumes 9–12 years and approximately one billion US dollars in costs. Due to the high finances and time costs required by the traditional drug discovery paradigm, repurposing old drugs to treat cancer and rare diseases is becoming popular. Computational approaches are mainly data-driven and involve a systematic analysis of different data types leading to the formulation of repurposing hypotheses. This study presents a novel scoring algorithm based on chemical and genomic data to repurpose drugs for 669 diseases from 22 groups, including various cancers, musculoskeletal, infections, cardiovascular, and skin diseases. The data types used to design the scoring algorithm are chemical structures, drug-target interactions (DTI), pathways, and disease-gene associations. The repurposed scoring algorithm is strengthened by integrating the most comprehensive manually curated datasets for each data type. At DrugRepo score ≥ 0.4, we repurposed 516 approved drugs across 545 diseases. Moreover, hundreds of novel predicted compounds can be matched with ongoing studies at clinical trials. Our analysis is supported by a web tool available at: http://drugrepo.org/ .

Developing cost-effective and environmentally friendly approaches to synthesize brominated chemicals, which are important intermediates for the synthesis of various useful molecules such as pharmaceuticals, surfactants, pesticides, and biologically active heterocyclic compounds, is of great significance. Herein, we present a highly efficient electrochemical bromine evolution reaction over vacancy rich Co 3 O 4 using cheap NaBr as the bromine source for the synthesis of valuable brominated fine chemicals and pharmaceuticals under ambient conditions. The introduction of oxygen vacancy onto Co 3 O 4 can greatly enhance the activity and selectivity of bromine evolution reaction by optimizing Br* intermediate adsorption and desorption, enabling bromination of a series of bioactive molecules and pharmaceuticals at high yields. Traditional bromine chemistry uses Br 2 , which is environmentally unfriendly and wasteful. Here, the authors design a scalable electrochemical route to synthesize Br-substituted molecules using NaBr over Co 3 O 4 under mild conditions and with high selectivity.

Ferroelectrics are essential in memory devices for multi-bit storage and high-density integration. Ferroelectricity mainly exists in compounds but rare in single-element materials due to their lack of spontaneous polarization in the latter. However, we report a room-temperature ferroelectricity in quasi-one-dimensional Te nanowires. Piezoelectric characteristics, ferroelectric loops and domain reversals are clearly observed. We attribute the ferroelectricity to the ion displacement created by the interlayer interaction between lone-pair electrons. Ferroelectric polarization can induce a strong field effect on the transport along the Te chain, giving rise to a self-gated ferroelectric field-effect transistor. By utilizing ferroelectric Te nanowire as channel, the device exhibits high mobility (~220 cm 2 ·V −1 ·s −1 ), continuous-variable resistive states can be observed with long-term retention (>10 5 s), fast speed (<20 ns) and high-density storage (>1.92 TB/cm 2 ). Our work provides opportunities for single-element ferroelectrics and advances practical applications such as ultrahigh-density data storage and computing-in-memory devices. Authors find room-temperature ferroelectricity in single element Te nanowires, highlighting that reducing dimensions to 1D in low-dimensional piezoelectric materials with chain structures is an effective strategy to induce ferroelectricity absent in their 2D form.