Minireview on microbe-nanomaterial synergies: Fundamental, interface mechanism, characterization and CO2 photo-fixation

Abstract

Solar driven bio-hybrids are promising composites formed by the integration of microbes and photocatalysts that opens up tremendous opportunities for sustainable CO2 conversion related applications. These microbes-photocatalyst hybrids (MPH) show exceptional solar-to-chemical conversion efficiency with high selectivity and are proposed to address the associated limitation of natural and artificial photosynthesis. MPH includes the advantageous features of both microbe and inorganic units that makes it a promising candidate in this area of research. This review presents brief ideas on challenges of natural photosynthesis, and an introduction to artificial photocatalysis highlighting reported literatures. Further, we discuss various state of art MPH systems reported towards CO2 conversionalong with the detailed interfacial charge transfer mechanism between micro-organism and photocatalyst. The review also elaborates different developed, efficiency and selectivity improvement strategies with suitable examples. Finally, the current challenges and future prospects in this direction are discussed well.

Keywords

• Nanomaterials
• Microbes
• CO2,Interface mechanism
• Photocatalyst