Nano-Confined Synthesis of Fullerene Mesoporous Carbon (C60-FMC) with Bimodal Pores: XRD, TEM, Structural Properties, NMR, and Protein Immobilization

Abstract

Nanoconfined synthesized crystalline fullerene mesoporous carbon (C 60 -FMC) with bimodal pore architectures of 4.95 nm and 10-15 nm pore sizes characterized by XRD, TEM, nitrogen adsorption/ desorption isotherm and solid-state NMR, and the material was used for protein immobilization. The solid-state 13 C NMR spectrum of C 60 -FMC along with XRD, BET and TEM confirms the formation of fullerene mesoporous carbon structure C 60 -FMC. The immobilization of albumin (from bovine serum, BSA) protein biomolecule in a buffer solution at pH 4.7 was used to determine the adsorption properties of the C 60 -FMC material and its structural changes investigated by FT-IR. We demonstrated that the C 60 -FMC with high surface area and pore volumes have excellent adsorption capacity towards BSA protein molecule. Protein adsorption experiments clearly showed that the C 60 -FMC with bimodal pore architectures (4.95 nm and 10-15 nm) are suitable material to be used for protein adsorption.and biomolecules or drugs adsorption on mesoporous carbons have been reported in the literatures [13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. It is also observed that mesoporous carbon materials exhibited better performance for these applications than that of counterpart silica material. Then, instead of using a conventional carbon source as mentioned above [1][2][3][4][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20] it will be necessary to find a new carbon source to create a new mesoporous carbon solid framework that will improve the adsorption of biomolecules. As such, Fullerenes (C 60 ) as carbon source consists of nanoscopic building block with surface tailorable that can give unique functionalities to the mesoporous carbon framework [21][22][23]. Previously, fullerene C 60 has been partly used along with porous silica for extending their surface functionalities [24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31][32] but C 60 has not been reported to be used as sole carbon source for preparing fullerene mesoporous carbon that can be useful for protein immobilization.With this concept in mind, this paper, successfully demonstrate the use of fullerene C 60 as carbon source to prepare a new class of fullerene mesoporous carbon (C 60 -FMC) with bimodal pore architectures via pore filling method and its properties for protein immobilization. Experimental Section MaterialsTetraethylorthosilicate (TEOS), Pluronic surfactant P123 (EO20PPO70EO20), Fullerene C 60 , Trimethylbenzene (TMB) and Albumin from Bovine serum (BSA) from Sigma-Aldrich were used as received without further purification.