Active metal (cadmium) doping enhanced the stability of inert metal (gold) nanocluster under O2 atmosphere and the catalysis activity of benzyl alcohol oxidation

Observation of gold sub-nanocluster nucleation within a crystalline protein cage

“…Second, the Cd atom coordinated by Glu130 plays an important role in stabilizing the sub-nanocluster by forming an Au 3 Cd unit as described in the literature (Supplementary Fig. 3)414243. The Cd atom could serve as a seed for Au sub-nanocluster formation in the three-fold channel in a manner similar to that observed for the Fe 3 O 4 nanocluster in the Dps-like (Dps, DNA-protecting protein during starvation) ferritin protein DpsA10.…”

The mechanism of metal exchange in non-metallic nanoclusters

“…38,39 The conguration of these nanoclusters can be viewed as the fcc-structured metal cores surrounding by SR-Au-SR complexes. In these metal cores, four vertex gold atoms in both Au 36 and Au 28 nanoclusters ( Fig. 1) are observed.…”

“…We substituted gold atoms in fcc structured Au 28 and Au 36 Doped nanoclusters provide an ideal model for understanding the metal synergy effect at the atomic level. [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] However, doping a specic number of hetero-metal atoms at specic positions is a great challenge in the synthesis of doped metal nanoclusters with maintained structure.…”

“…31,32 Interestingly, we previously reported a metalexchange strategy by doping the template gold nanocluster with the thiolated metal complexes as the heteroatom source. 2,19 Since it is hard to obtain metal nanoclusters composed of active metals, this strategy has been widely used in the synthesis of alloy nanoclusters, which not only provides an effective strategy for doping specic atoms into specic positions with controllable numbers, but also enhances the properties of alloy nanoclusters relative to the parent nanoclusters, such as uorescence, [33][34][35] catalytic activity, 36 and chiral optical activity. 37 Starting from the structure maintained, the synergistic effect can be understood at the atomic level.…”

“…The fcc-structured Au 36 and Au 28 nanoclusters were synthesized by ligand-exchange on Au 38 and Au 25 nanoclusters with TBBT, respectively. 38,39 The conguration of these nanoclusters can be viewed as the fcc-structured metal cores surrounding by SR-Au-SR complexes.…”