review · ACS Sensors
Single-atom nanozymes rely on catalytic active sites formed by isolated single atoms, offering precise control over catalytic performance compared with natural enzymes and bulk materials. These nanomaterials show strong potential for use in biosensing, biomedical devices, environmental remediation, diagnostics, and food processing technologies. However, several technical obstacles remain before widespread adoption can occur. Key challenges include understanding catalysis mechanisms, ensuring biosafety, achieving higher specificity, and scaling up production. Combining artificial intelligence and machine learning tools with advanced materials science offers a route to map structure-performance relationships, which can enhance material selectivity and processing efficiency. Resolving these fundamental issues could enable single-atom nanozymes to serve as efficient catalytic tools for sustainable industrial and medical applications.
Natural enzymes are critical for chemical processes but can be unstable and difficult to control. Single-atom nanozymes mimic these functions with synthetic precision, potentially lowering costs and improving efficiency across diagnostics, environmental clean-up, and sustainable food manufacturing. Overcoming current biosafety and manufacturing hurdles could make these artificial catalysts practical alternatives in everyday healthcare and industrial operations.
The technology points towards applications in medical diagnostics, biosensing instruments, environmental clean-up systems, and food processing plants. Potential users include biomedical device developers, industrial manufacturers, and environmental monitoring teams. This research represents an early conceptual and exploratory stage, as critical issues around scalability, biosafety, catalytic specificity, and underlying mechanisms must be resolved before commercial products can be manufactured.
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Single-atom nanozymes (SANs) have become a breakthrough in atomically precise catalysis, which relies on the catalytic active site formed by the single-atom itself. From this angle, SANs and their advantages compared to natural enzymes as well as spaces for their application are emphasized. The SANs have outstanding control over their catalytic activities; this is compared with bulk materials and natural enzymes. The structure of the SANs has very promising potential for the next generation of biosensing and biomedical devices and environmental remediation. Although their capabilities are high, difficulties still arise. The specificity, scalability, biosafety, and catalysis mechanisms raise additional issues that require further research. We build up a vision of the perspectives of the better implementation of SANs, which are designed for diagnostic purposes, improving industrial technologies, and creating new sustainable technologies in the food processing industry. AI and machine learning systems may clarify the structure-performance relationship of SANs for improved material and process selectivity. The future of SANs is very promising, and by addressing these challenges and leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence and materials science, SANs have the potential to become powerful tools for a sustainable future.
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DOI: 10.1021/acssensors.4c00630
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