Novel Supramolecular Photocatalyst Based on Conjugation
of Cucurbit[7]uril to Non-Metallated Porphyrin for
Electrophotocatalytic Hydrogen Generation from Water
Splitting
What prompted you to investigate this topic?
For centuries it has been a dream of humanity to turn water into energy and to have materials that can mimic the plants which realize the photosynthesis. Nowadays we even have a higher urgency to bring this dream into life to reduce depend-ence on oil and other fossil fuels as well as to perfect greener sources of energy to improve the environment. To this end, photocatalytic water splitting has been demonstrated as a clean and simplest means for the conversion of solar energy into hydrogen fuel. Although extensive research has been car-ried out to generate hydrogen from water splitting, sustainable production of hydrogen is still a great challenge. Especially it is quite important to develop stable and efficient organic photo-catalytic materials that can be used for water splitting.
What other topics are you working on at the moment?
Our group focuses on the development of functional supra-molecular and nanostructured materials that can be used in di-verse areas including but not limited to theragnostic, antibac-terial photodynamic therapy, dual chemo and photodynamic cancer therapies, optoelectronics and photocatalysis.
Our research can be described as interdisciplinary, versatile and adaptable. For instance, we have found out that the mate-rial used in this study as a photocatalyst can also be used as an efficient photosensitizer as well as a drug carrier for antibac-terial photodynamic therapy and the dual photodynamic/
chemo-cancer therapy to the presence of photoactive porphy-rin moiety and Cucurbituril-hosts molecules.
Acknowledgements
We thank The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey-T3BI˙TAK for funding (KBAG 215Z035).
The front cover artwork for Issue 13/2019 is provided by Tuncel and co-workers at UNAM and the Chemistry Department of Bilkent University (Turkey). The image shows solar energy promoted photoelectrocatalytic water splitting for hydrogen gen-eration using a supramolecular photocatalyst.
See the Communication itself at https://doi.org/10.1002/cctc.201900144.
Dr. Yogesh Kumar Dr. Bhushan Patil Dr. Aisan Khaligh Seyed E. Hadi Prof. Tamer Uyar Prof. Dçnes Tuncel
Homepage: www.fen.bilkent.edu.tr/~ dtuncel
ChemCatChem 2019, 11, 2940 2940 T 2019 Wiley-VCH Verlag GmbH & Co. KGaA, Weinheim
