Yang Bing et.al published a paper on Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. on April 13, 2016.
Recently, Yang Bing et.al published a paper on Angew. Chem. Int. Ed. Engl. on April 13, 2016. This work, for the first time, introduced a set of amphiphilic water oxidation catalysts (WOCs). These two WOCs not only showed good solubility in water, but also underwent self-assembly in aqueous solutions, which were confirmed by UV-Vis, SEM and DLS experiments. Further mechanistic studies illustrated that the high valent Ru=O intermediate species as well as the O-O bond formation pathways were altered by the different aggregation patterns of the WOCs. Study on oxygen evolution from an assembling perspective helps understanding the mechanism for O-O bond formation, at the same time, it provides us a possibility to gain insight into the reaction center in PSII, a supramolecular environment for oxygen generation in natural photosynthesis.