Zhang Meng,Hu Zheng,Gu Lin,Zhang Qinghua,Zhang Linghui,Song Qian,Zhou Wei,Hu Shi
A series of carbon-based binary single-atom catalysts of Fe and Ni coordinated by nitrogen are fabricated using a glucose-chelating method. Depending on the Ni/Fe content, they exhibit a wide-range of controllable CO/H 2 ratio from 0.14 to 10.86, which is meaningful to specific chemical processes. The durability of the catalyst is evaluated over an 8-hour period with no significant degradation of activity. The variation of the faradaic efficiency with Ni/Fe content is justified by density-functional-theory based calculation of the reaction barrier in both hydrogen evolution and CO 2 reduction reactions.
Highly stable and multifunctional fluorescent quantum dots are particularly attractive in practical applications. Here, a new kind of ultra-small-sized silicon quantum dot-gadolinium (SiQD-Gd) was successfully fabricated by a newly-designed facile hydrothermal growth and chelating method. The obtained SiQD-Gd exhibited outstanding water dispersibility, stability and good fluorescent property with the quantum yield of 11.6%. SiQD-Gd displayed a low cytotoxicity in normal cell lines (HELF, HEK293F) and tumor cell lines (H1299, A549). Meanwhile, SiQD-Gd showed excellent magnetic resonance response with r 1 relaxation rate of 10.5 mmol L −1 ·s −1 and r 2 relaxation rate of 47.5 mmol L −1 ·s −1 , which are 2.5 and 7.4 times enhanced comparing to that of the commercial MR agent Magnevist. In vivo studies showed significant contrast enhancement effect of its T 1 - and T 2 -weighted MR imaging. In addition, in vivo fluorescent imaging for mice and zebrafish indicated its potential applications in fluorescent tracking. Thus, the excellent multimodal imaging capacity and biocompatibility of SiQD-Gd make it a potential imaging agent for clinic applications.