Ball-milling Synthesis of Single-atom Cu Anchored on N-Doped Carbon for Mimicking Peroxidase

N anozymes have shown great potential for life sciences owing to their distinct advantages, such as low cost and high stability, compared with natural enzymes. Despite significant progress, state-of-art nanozymes commonly suffer from relatively low specific activities. Herein, we propose a promising to address this issue by creating single-atom nanozymes. A ball-milling-assisted strategy has been developed to induce the transformation of Cu species from bulk to single atoms. The highly-simplified steps allow a large-scale synthesis, that over 4.2 g of single-atom Cu−N doped carbon nanozymes can be achieved in one pot. It exhibits a remarkably improved peroxidase-like activity and stability compared with N doped C anchored Cu nanoparticles. Further experimental firmly reveals the crucial role of the single-atom Cu site that can generate more active ·OH species for boosting the catalytic process.