Enhancement Strategies for Peroxidase-like Activities of Nanomaterials / 中国生物化学与分子生物学报

ABSTRACT

Due to their high catalytic activity and substrate specificity, enzymes have broad applications in commodity chemistry, medicine, food manufacturing, pollution prevention and control, etc. However, their actual applications are compromised by disadvantages such as difficulty to separate and purify, high cost and poor stability. It is of great significance to explore artificial substitutes for enzymes. Ferroferric oxide nanoparticles were reported to have peroxidase-like activity by Dr. Xiyun Yan for the first time in 2007. Since then the researches about nanomaterials with catalytic activities have emerged in large numbers. In addition to peroxidase-like activities, nanomaterials also possessed many enzyme-like catalytic activities such as oxidase, superoxide dismutase and catalase. Nanomaterials with enzyme-like activities are usually referred as nanozymes. As an alternative to natural enzymes, nanozymes possess characteristics such as low costs, easy mass production, high stability and adjustable activity. Those nanozyme characteristics have broad applications in environmental monitoring and management, disease diagnosis and treatment, food safety control, etc. However, low catalytic efficiency and specificity limit further applications of nanozymes. Therefore, enhancing the catalytic activities and selectivity of nanozymes will promote their applications. The catalytic activity of nanozymes can be regulated by changes in nanomaterials (size, morphology and surface modification) and catalytic reaction conditions (temperature, pH, accelerators, light irradiation, etc.), mixing of different nanomaterials, nanomaterial hybridization, and so on. The most widely used catalytic activity of nanozymes is peroxidase-like activity. This review summarizes the strategies to enhance peroxidase-like activities of nanomaterials, mainly focuses on catalytic efficiency and substrate specificity. It is expected that readers can have a comprehensive understanding of the strategies to enhance the enzyme-like activity of nanomaterials.