From Biomimetic Mineralization to Carbonization: Fabricating Heterostructured Porous Carbon Materials with MOF Encapsulated Bacteria

ABSTRACT:Hierarchical porous carbons (HPCs) hold great promise in energy-related applications owing to their excellent chemical stability and well-developed porous structures. Attention has been drawn toward developing new synthetic strategies and precursor materials that permit greater control over composition, size, morphology, and pore structure. There is a growing trend of employing metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) as HPC precursors as their highly customizable characteristics favor new HPC syntheses. In this article, we report a biomimetically grown bacteria-templated MOF synthesis where the bacteria not only facilitates the formation of MOF nanocrystals, but also provides morphology and porosity control. The resultant HPCs show improved electrochemical capacity behavior compared to pristine MOF derived HPCs. Considering the broad availability of bacteria and ease of its production, in addition to significantly improved MOF growth efficiency on bacterial templates, we believe that bacteria-templated MOF is a promising strategy to produce a new generation of HPCs.