Supplementary MaterialsSupplementary Information srep14341-s1. cysteine sensor was developed. Fasudil HCl inhibitor The porous and hierarchical superstructures and large surface area of the as-formed Fe3O4/carbon superstructures eventually contributed to the good electrocatalytic activity of the prepared sensor towards the oxidation of N-acetyl cysteine. The proposed planning approach to the hierarchical Fe3O4/carbon superstructures is easy, efficient, inexpensive and an easy task to mass creation. It might open up up a fresh method for hierarchical superstructures planning. Fe3O4 offers attracted tremendous interest because of its novel magnetic and catalytic properties. Fasudil HCl inhibitor Nevertheless, its poor conductivity, easy aggregation and uselessness in solid acidic remedy exclude it as promising components in many areas such as for example electrochemistry and biology. To conquer these disadvantages, other agents (electronic.g., liposome, micelle, polymer, silica) with compensatory properties was released into Fe3O41. Included in this, carbon was the normal materials used to market Fe3O4s conductivity and stability. For instance, Fe3O4 embedded into porous carbon nanosheets or nanotube was take advantage of the conductivity of carbon and utilized as a long lasting high-price lithium ion electric battery anode material. Simultaneously, the carbon matrix might efficiently inhibit the aggregation of Fe3O42,3. The Fe3O4@carbon nanocomposites after additional modification with solid oxidizing agents may be biocompatible and used as medication delivery4. Lately, one-stage hydrothermal synthesis of Fe3O4@carbon nanocomposites offers been reported with great efficiency in biomedicine5. Generally, you can find two ways of synthesize Fe3O4@carbon nanocomposites. The 1st technique can be wet chemistry, that’s, Fe3O4@carbon can be synthesized by combining Fe3O4 nanoparticles or their precursors with a carbon resource (electronic.g., glucose, dopamine, ethylene glycol, citric acid, oleic acid, EDTA, etc.) accompanied by a carbonization procedure5,6,7,8,9,10. Because of this strategy, a solid reliance on reaction circumstances was required, therefore aggregation and chemical substance wastes had been inevitably happened. Furthermore, most products got compact and soft exteriors, limiting the effective usage of inner surface area. The next method is dried out technique such as for example magnetron sputtering. With this technique, the resulted Fe3O4@carbon often demonstrated low dimensionality2. Actually, the house of materials could be improved by tailoring their styles, sizes and compositions11. Much work has been specialized in style the morphology of components for additional promoting their performance12,13. Recently three-dimensional (3D) architecture was employed as a template to afford both high porosity and good conductivity14,15. For example, Pt-based bimetallic flower-like or dendritic-like NPs showed great potential as catalysts for reducing the Pt consumption, providing a high surface area, and facilitating enhanced performance in the catalytic applications16,17,18,19,20. Recently, metal-organic framework (MOF), a new class of hybrid functional materials has attracted extensive attention for their diverse structures, topologies and compositions. The MOFs-template method has been adopted to form metal/metal oxide micro/nanostructures with various controlled shapes including microplates, nanowires, nanorods, nanoparticles, Fasudil HCl inhibitor nanosheets, hollow and coralloid nanostructures via controlling reaction temperature, reaction time, precursors, etc21,22,23,24,25. Generally, metal Fasudil HCl inhibitor ions with a reduction potential of ?0.27 volts or higher present in MOFs form metal NPs during thermolysis in N2, whereas metal ions with a reduction potential lower than ?0.27 volts form metal oxide NPs during thermolysis in N2. MIL-88A as an important kind of MOFs was synthesized by linking Fe(III) to the oxygen atoms of fumaric acid regularly26. The ordered structure effectively prevented the aggregation of Fe3O4 nanoparticles Rabbit Polyclonal to OR2T2 and the unsaturated organic linker not only acted as reducing agent but also could be further transformed into porous carbon when MIL-88A was decomposed to Fe3O427. Recently, Hee Jung Lee synthesized magnetic particle-embedded porous carbon composites from MIL-88A under relatively high temperature28. Differing from their work, the present work focused Fasudil HCl inhibitor on the transformation process of MIL-88A when it was calcinated from 200?C to 500?C. Furthermore, the relationship between the structure of precursors and morphologies of products was also presented in this work. We found that, calcinated at low temperatures, the MIL-88A could convert to 3D hierarchical Fe3O4/carbon superstructures with controllable particle size and shape and performed good electrical conductivity due to the carbon matrix enhanced the electrochemical property of the nanocomposites (Fig. 1). Although remarkably significant progress has been obtained in shape-controlled synthesis of MOFs so far, MOF-derived Fe3O4@carbon with different particle sizes and morphologies have not been reported yet. Open in a separate window Figure 1 Schematic illustration of the formation process of Fe3O4@C nanostructures derived from MIL-88A. Results and Discussion Porous carbon coated Fe3O4 was synthesized based on the solid-template method. The hierarchical Fe3O4/carbon superstructures with different morphologies can be achieved by pyrolysis of MIL-88A.