Structure-activity relationship of ipglycermide binding to phosphoglycerate mutases
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Molecularly derived single-site heterogeneous catalysts can bridge the understanding and performance gaps between conventional homogeneous and heterogeneous catalysis, guiding the rational design of next-generation catalysts. While impressive advances have been made with well-defined oxide supports, the structural complexity of other supports and the nature of the grafted surface species present an intriguing challenge. In this study, single-site Mo(=O) 2 species grafted onto reduced graphene oxide (rGO/MoO 2 ) are characterized by XPS, DRIFTS, powder XRD, N 2 physisorption, NH 3 -TPD, aqueous contact angle, active site poisoning assay, Mo EXAFS, model compound single-crystal XRD, DFT, and catalytic performance. NH 3 -TPD reveals that the anchored MoO 2 moiety is not strongly acidic, while Mo 3d 5/2 XPS assigns the oxidation state as Mo(VI), and XRD shows little rGO periodicity change on MoO 2 grafting. Contact angle analysis shows that MoO 2 grafting consumes rGO surface polar groups, yielding a more hydrophobic surface. The rGO/MoO 2 DRIFTS assigns features at 959 and 927 cm –1 to the symmetric and antisymmetric Mo=O stretching modes, respectively, of an isolated cis-(O=Mo=O) moiety, in agreement with DFT computation. Moreover, the Mo EXAFS rGO/MoO 2 structural data are consistent with isolated (C–O) 2– Mo(=O) 2 species having two Mo=O bonds and two Mo–O bonds at distances of 1.69(3) and 1.90(3) Å, respectively. rGO/MoO 2 is also more active than the previously reported AC/MoO 2 catalyst, with reductive carbonyl coupling TOFs approaching 1.81 × 10 3 h –1 . rGO/MoO 2 is environmentally robust and multiply recyclable with 69 ± 2% of the Mo sites catalytically significant. Altogether, rGO/MoO 2 is a structurally well-defined and versatile single-site Mo(VI) dioxo heterogeneous catalytic system.
Biocatalysis is an attractive methodology due to its sustainable metrics, combined with its vaunted regio-, chemo-, and stereoselectivity. Among biocatalysts, oxidoreductases catalyze redox transformations on a wide variety of substrates and are thus particularly attractive for synthetic applications. Many oxidoreductases depend on nicotinamide-based cofactors; however, the high cost and poor atom economy of such cofactors can negate the advantage of biosynthetic processes. The native cofactors (i.e., NADH or NADPH) can be replaced by nicotinamide cofactor biomimetics (NCBs) to address these issues. Additionally, NCBs can enhance enzyme activity due to structures with expanded redox properties. These capabilities open possibilities for reactivity and biorthogonality. Thus, the field has responded with new NCB structures, including variation in their electronic and molecular recognition properties. This perspective focuses on structure-activity relationships of simple NCBs, including their function, stability, and other properties, along with methods for their regeneration in biosynthesis.
Solid supports are crucial in heterogeneous catalysis due to their profound effects on catalytic activity and selectivity. However, elucidating the specific effects arising from such supports remains challenging. We selected a series of metal–organic frameworks (MOFs) with 8-connected Zr 6 nodes as supports to deposit molybdenum(VI) onto to study the effects of pore environment and topology on the resulting Mo-supported catalysts. As characterized by X-ray absorption spectroscopy (XAS) and single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD), we modulated the chemical environments of the deposited Mo species. For Mo-NU-1000, the Mo species monodentately bound to the Zr 6 nodes were anchored in the microporous c-pore, but for Mo-NU-1008 they were bound in the mesopore of Mo-NU-1008. Both monodentate and bidentate modes were found in the mesopore of Mo-NU-1200. Cyclohexene epoxidation with H 2 O 2 was probed to evaluate the support effect on catalytic activity and to unveil the resulting structure–activity relationships. SCXRD and XAS studies demonstrated the atomically precise structural differences of the Mo binding motifs over the course of cyclohexene epoxidation. No apparent structural change was observed for Mo-NU-1000, whereas the monodentate mode of Mo species in Mo-NU-1008 and the monodentate and bidentate Mo species in Mo-NU-1200 evolved to a new bidentate mode bound between two adjacent oxygen atoms from the Zr 6 node. This work demonstrates the great advantage of using MOF supports for constructing heterogeneous catalysts with modulated chemical environments of an active species and elucidating structure–activity relationships in the resulting reactions.
The understanding of structure–activity relationships at the atomic level has played a profound role in heterogeneous catalysis, providing valuable insights into designing suitable heterogeneous catalysts. However, uncovering the detailed roles of how such active species’ structures affect their catalytic performance remains a challenge owing to the lack of direct structural information on a specific active species. Herein, we deposited molybdenum(VI), an active species in oxidation reactions, on the Zr 6 node of a mesoporous zirconium-based metal–organic framework (MOF) NU-1200, using solvothermal deposition in MOFs (SIM). Due to the high crystallinity of the NU-1200 support, the precise structure of the resulting molybdenum catalyst, Mo-NU-1200, was characterized through single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD). Two distinct anchoring modes of the molybdenum species were observed: one mode (Mo1), displaying an octahedral geometry, coordinated to the node through one terminal oxygen atom and the other mode (Mo2) coordinated to two adjacent Zr 6 node oxygen atoms in a tetrahedral geometry. To investigate the role of base in the catalytic activity of these Mo centers, we assessed the activity of Mo-NU-1200 for the aerobic oxidation of 4-methoxybenzyl alcohol as a model reaction. The results revealed that Mo-NU-1200 exhibited remarkably higher catalytic reactivity under base-free conditions, while the presence of base inhibited the catalytic reactivity of this species. SCXRD studies revealed that the molybdenum binding motifs (structures of the supported metal on the Zr 6 node in the MOF) changed over the course of the reactions. Following the oxidation without base, both pristine coordination modes (Mo1 and Mo2) evolved into a new coordination mode (Mo3), in which the molybdenum atom coordinated to two adjacent oxygen atoms from the Zr 6 node in an octahedral geometry, while in the presence of base, the pristine Mo1 coordination mode evolved entirely into the pristine Mo2. Here, this study demonstrates the direct observation of an active species’ structural evolution from metal installation to subsequent catalytic reaction. As a result, these subtle structural changes in catalyst binding motifs led to distinct differences in catalytic activities, providing a compelling strategy for elucidating structure–activity relationships.
This BES research investigates the physicochemical properties of metal oxides and how they affect electrocatalytic functionalities. The goal is to develop a predictive framework for realizing top-performing electrocatalytic materials for energy-critical reactions. The hypothesis is that well-defined thin films allow detailed mapping of structural-activity relationships because flat surfaces are more straightforward to characterize. Furthermore, the well-defined nature of thin-film metal oxides allows precise tuning of structural and chemical variables for structure-activity-relationship mapping. The proposed research has two technical objectives. The first is to experimentally assess whether the binding energies of surface oxygen can serve as an activity descriptor for oxygen electrocatalysis on metal oxides and then how to control them by tuning the structure and chemical variables. The second is to find the rate-limiting process in oxygen electrocatalysis and other small-molecule reactions. Similar mechanistic insights have been developed on well-defined platinum surfaces but not yet on oxides. This research addresses this gap and uses electrochemistry and X-ray photoemission spectroscopy to study oxide surface chemistry. The obtained insights are collectively analyzed to reveal how the oxides’ structural and chemical variables affect kinetics and can be used to design more active electrocatalysts for energy-critical reactions.
In this work, we theoretically study the effect of external deformation on activated structural relaxation and aspects of the nonlinear mechanical response of glassy hard sphere fluids in the context of elastically collective nonlinear Langevin equation theory. This microscopic force-based approach describes activated relaxation as a coupled local–nonlocal event involving caging and longer range collective elasticity, with the latter becoming more important and ultimately dominant with increasing packing fraction under equilibrium conditions. The central new question we address is how this physical picture of activated relaxation, and the relative importance of local caging vs collective elasticity physics, depends on external deformation. Theoretical predictions are presented for deformation-induced enhancement of mobility, the onset of relaxation speed up at remarkably low values of stress, strain, or shear rate, apparent power law thinning of the steady state structural relaxation time and viscosity, a non-vanishing activation barrier in the shear thinning regime, an apparent Herschel–Bulkley form of the rate dependence of the steady state shear stress, exponential growth of different measures of a dynamic yield or flow stress with the packing fraction, and reduced fragility and dynamic heterogeneity under deformation. The results are contrasted with experiments and simulations, and qualitative or better agreement is found. An overarching conclusion is that deformation strongly reduces the importance of longer range collective elastic effects relative to the local caging aspect for most, but not all, physical questions, with deformation-dependent fragility and dynamic heterogeneity phenomena being qualitatively sensitive to collective elasticity. Overall, nonlinear rheology is predicted to be a more local problem than quiescent structural relaxation, albeit with deformation-modified activated processes still important.
Understanding the decaying mechanism in lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) is critical to establishing a stable electrolyte system. Despite the advent of various novel electrolyte solvents designated for high-voltage LIBs, their working principles are not fully understood. Currently, oxidative decomposition of electrolytes is believed to be the major cause of capacity fade, and tremendous effort has been devoted to discovering a new electrolyte with enhanced anodic stability. However, the oxidative decomposition process cannot solely explain the rapid decay of some electrolyte systems with intrinsic high anodic stability when used with a high-nickel layered oxide cathode such as LiNi 0.6 Mn 0.2 Co 0.2 O 2 (NMC622). In this report, a study of the quantitative structure-activity relationship was conducted to deepen the mechanistic understanding of the decay in high-voltage LIBs. Here, the results obtained from the newly introduced molecular pair analysis and linear free-energy relationship (LFER) studies were highly consistent with the solvation-involved decaying mechanism in a high-nickel layered oxide cathode cycling at high voltage (> 4.5 V vs. Li/Li + ). There was no evidence correlating the solvation ability of electrolyte solvents with the decay of a high-nickel layered oxide cathode cycling at a relatively low voltage (< 4.3 V vs. Li/Li + ), nor with the high-voltage spinel cathode LiNi 0.5 Mn 1.5 O 4 (LNMO). Undoubtedly, the unveiled mechanistic insight provides a critical guideline for the development of an appropriate electrolyte system targeting different high-voltage cathode materials.
In heterogeneous catalysis, the promotion of low temperature activity and enhancement of thermal stability simultaneously especially for precious metal catalysts is always highly demanded but very challenging. In this work, we report a novel Pt catalyst on ceria-alumina (CeO 2 /Al 2 O 3 ) support (Pt/CA-T) engineered by a two-step ceria deposition strategy, exhibiting superior thermal stability and low-temperature carbon monoxide (CO) oxidation activity after activation. Pt single sites anchored to engineered CeO 2 edge sites are much more stable than that to CeO 2 (111) surface, and such stable single sites can be transformed into highly active Pt clusters for efficient low-temperature CO oxidation. Active site identification indicates that the CO oxidation activity of different Pt sites follows such sequence: Pt cluster step sites ≈ Pt cluster terrace sites > Pt cluster corner sites $\gg$ Pt single sites on CeO 2 . The excellent low temperature activity of activated Pt/CA-T catalyst for CO oxidation is associated with its abundant Pt cluster step and terrace sites as well as rich Pt-CeO 2 interfaces, which facilitate the adsorption of active CO species and superior oxygen activation/transfer ability. The present study provides new insights into the structure–activity relationship of Pt-CeO 2 -Al 2 O 3 catalyst, which can also guide the preparation of other highly robust supported catalysts for important industrial applications.
Abstract The specificity of toxicant-target biomolecule interactions lends to the very imbalanced nature of many toxicity datasets, causing poor performance in Structure–Activity Relationship (SAR)-based chemical classification. Undersampling and oversampling are representative techniques for handling such an imbalance challenge. However, removing inactive chemical compound instances from the majority class using an undersampling technique can result in information loss, whereas increasing active toxicant instances in the minority class by interpolation tends to introduce artificial minority instances that often cross into the majority class space, giving rise to class overlapping and a higher false prediction rate. In this study, in order to improve the prediction accuracy of imbalanced learning, we employed SMOTEENN, a combination of Synthetic Minority Over-sampling Technique (SMOTE) and Edited Nearest Neighbor (ENN) algorithms, to oversample the minority class by creating synthetic samples, followed by cleaning the mislabeled instances. We chose the highly imbalanced Tox21 dataset, which consisted of 12 in vitro bioassays for > 10,000 chemicals that were distributed unevenly between binary classes. With Random Forest (RF) as the base classifier and bagging as the ensemble strategy, we applied four hybrid learning methods, i.e., RF without imbalance handling (RF), RF with Random Undersampling (RUS), RF with SMOTE (SMO), and RF with SMOTEENN (SMN). The performance of the four learning methods was compared using nine evaluation metrics, among which F 1 score, Matthews correlation coefficient and Brier score provided a more consistent assessment of the overall performance across the 12 datasets. The Friedman’s aligned ranks test and the subsequent Bergmann-Hommel post hoc test showed that SMN significantly outperformed the other three methods. We also found that a strong negative correlation existed between the prediction accuracy and the imbalance ratio (IR), which is defined as the number of inactive compounds divided by the number of active compounds. SMN became less effective when IR exceeded a certain threshold (e.g., > 28). The ability to separate the few active compounds from the vast amounts of inactive ones is of great importance in computational toxicology. This work demonstrates that the performance of SAR-based, imbalanced chemical toxicity classification can be significantly improved through the use of data rebalancing.
Here we combine polymer integral equation theory for structural correlations with a force-level theory for activated segmental relaxation to construct a microscopic theory for how ions modify the onset of segmental localization, the polymer alpha relaxation time, and glass transition temperature, T g , in dry polymerized ionic liquids (PolyILs). Our most important findings concerning the behavior of T g are (i) a weak dependence on anion–cation Coulomb attraction strength due to strong decoupling of ion and segmental dynamics, (ii) strong reduction with increasing mobile ion size due to both plasticization effects and weakening of ion-modified monomer caging, and (iii) increase with backbone rigidity and intrachain dynamic cooperativity. We quantitatively estimate T g variations as ion size and polymer static and dynamic rigidity are widely varied. The experimental data of 19 PolyILs are organized into a specific pattern consistent with the theoretical predictions with glass transition temperatures varying over a very wide range (~250 K) as observed experimentally. Based on the theoretical results, suggestions are made concerning the search for high conductivity Li- or Na-based PolyILs based on further lowering of T g via new polymer synthesis. Calculations of the alpha time as a function of packing fraction reveal the dynamic fragility increases for larger mobile ions, a more flexible backbone, and/or a smaller degree of intrachain dynamic cooperativity, as a consequence of the increasing importance of collective elasticity in determining the activation barrier. An analysis of transient segmental localization and a crossover to activated dynamics reveals similar, but not identical, trends as predicted at the laboratory vitrification timescale.
The structure–property relationships of metal–organic framework (MOF)-based solid-state electrolytes are not well understood. Herein, a systematic investigation of 12 Zr(IV)-based UiO-66 MOFs with varying ether-chain functional groups was carried out to elucidate the critical microscopic interactions that facilitate improved solid-state electrolyte performance. Enhanced sampling molecular dynamics (MD) simulations were employed and revealed a three-tier ion hopping mechanism: linker–linker hopping, linker-counterion hopping, and counterion-counterion hopping. Detailed structural analysis of the MD trajectories revealed that the chemistry and morphology of the linker groups affect the relative stability and population distribution of the electrolyte components, such that crown-ether-based linker groups enhance the probability of extended, low-barrier ion percolation pathways. As a result, we were able to tune the ionic conductivities by rationally manipulating the counterion distributions, linker binding strengths, and the configurational entropy (multivariability of the linkers). The resulting performance of these MOF-based solid-state electrolytes was significantly enhanced, with a methoxy-functionalized framework (UiO-66-L1 100 ) achieving high ionic conductivities of 2.32 × 10 –4 S/cm and 2.07 × 10 –3 S/cm at 30 °C and 90 °C, respectively, an order of magnitude greater than other all-solid-state MOF electrolyte systems. The electrolyte stability was evaluated with LiIn|LPSCl|MOF:LiTFSI|LPSCl|LiIn symmetric cells, showing excellent Li plating/stripping processes for over 2 months.
Solid supports play an indispensable role in heterogeneous catalysis, as they can directly affect the catalytic activity and selectivity of supported catalysts. However, the specific roles of such supports remain to be demystified owing to the difficulties in obtaining precise structural information on supported catalysts. To understand the effects of MOF topology, pore environment, and metal identity of node supports on the catalytic activity, a Ni catalyst was supported on eight Zr- or Hf-MOFs based on 8-connected nodes: namely M-NU-1200, M-NU-1000, M-NU-1008, and M-NU-1010 (M = Zr, Hf). Single-crystal X-ray diffraction (SCXRD), diffuse reflectance infrared Fourier transform spectroscopy (DRIFTS), and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) were employed to characterize the supported catalyst structures. To investigate the support effects on their activities, the supported Ni catalysts were evaluated by using ethylene hydrogenation as a model reaction. The results revealed that all Hf-based-MOF-supported Ni catalysts exhibited higher catalytic reactivity with TOF (turnover frequency) values at least double of those isostructural Zr counterparts. Additionally, MOFs with less congested metal anchoring sites, as a result of the topology and surrounding pore environment, yielded higher TOFs, suggesting the importance of supports in dictating both the catalyst accessibility and activity. Computational analysis complemented the experimental observations and provided insights into reaction barrier differences and their performance variation. Furthermore, this study demonstrates the essential role of the supports and provides a thought for selecting/designing suitable supports in heterogeneous catalysis.