Rational Design of Functional and Tunable Nanozymatic Networks

Cells in living systems are stimulated to produce diverse biological responses, which are regulated by complex chemical reaction networks (CRNs). Artificial CRNs, primarily relying on sophisticated multi-enzyme or nucleic acids architectures as basic units, provide a powerful abstraction to formally represent marvelous biochemical processes. From a perspective of large-scale industrial applications, it is highly envisioned to substitute natural molecules to develop CRNs with similar behaviors but remains a grand challenge. Herein, we report single atom Co-N-doped carbon nanotubes (Co-N-CNTs) as the basic unit for CRNs. Thanks to multiple nanozymatic reactions of Co-N-CNTs, several essential biological regulation functionalities were successfully integrated into a single programmable network, including cascade reaction, negative feedback, and positive feedforward. By incorporating the proposed nanozymatic network into microfluidic flow reactors as a cell mimic, selective recognition of small reductive biomolecules was further achieved under the bypass mode. This work would open a new avenue for artificial CRNs construction and extend biological applications of lifelike materials.