Radical-driven photocatalytic transformation of organic molecules

Photodynamic treatment of multidrug-resistant bacterial infection using indium phosphide quantum dots

Infections caused by multidrug-resistant (MDR) bacteria pose an impending threat to humanity, as the evolution of MDR bacteria outpaces the development of effective antibiotics. In this work, we use indium phosphide (InP) quantum dots (QDs) to treat infections caused by MDR bacteria via photodynamic therapy (PDT), which shows superior bactericidal efficiency over common antibiotics. PDT in the presence of InP QDs results in high-efficiency bactericidal activity towards various bacterial species, including Staphylococcus aureus, Bacillus cereus, Escherichia coli and Pseudomonas aeruginosa. Upon light absorption, InP QDs generate superoxide (O₂˙^-), which leads to efficient and selective killing of MDR bacteria while mammalian cells remain intact. The cytotoxicity evaluation reveals that InP QDs are bio- and blood-compatible in a wide therapeutic window. For the in vivo study, we drop a solution of InP QDs at a concentration within the therapeutic window onto MDR S. aureus-infected skin wounds of mice and perform PDT for 15 min. InP QDs show excellent therapeutic and prophylactic efficacy in treating MDR bacterial infection. These findings show that InP QDs have great potential to serve as antibacterial agents for MDR bacterial infection treatment, as an effective and complementary alternative to conventional antibiotics.

Efficient, Selective CO2 Photoreduction Enabled by Facet-Resolved Redox-Active Sites on Colloidal CdS Nanosheets

Advances in nanotechnology have enabled precise design of catalytic sites for CO₂ photoreduction, pushing product selectivity to near unity. However, activity of most nanostructured photocatalysts remains underwhelming due to fast recombination of photogenerated electron-hole pairs and sluggish hole transfer. To address these issues, we construct colloidal CdS nanosheets (NSs) with the large basal planes terminated by S^2- atomic layers as intrinsic photocatalysts (CdS-S^2- NSs). Experimental investigation reveals that the S^2- termination endows ultrathin CdS-S^2- NSs with facet-resolved redox-catalytic sites: oxidation occurs on S^2--terminated large basal facets and reduction happens on side facets. Such an allocation of redox sites not only promotes spatial separation of photoinduced electrons and holes but also facilitates balanced extraction of holes and electrons by shortening the hole diffusion distance along the (001) direction of the ultrathin NSs. Consequently, the CdS-S^2- NSs exhibit superb performance for photocatalytic CO₂-to-CO conversion, which was verified by the isotope-labeled experiments to be a record-breaking performance: a CO selectivity of 99%, a CO formation rate of 2.13 mol g^-1 h^-1, and an effective apparent quantum efficiency of 42.1% under the irradiation (340 to 450 nm) of a solar simulator (AM 1.5G). The breakthrough performance achieved in this work provides novel insights into the precise design of nanostructures for selective and efficient CO₂ photoreduction.