Multienzymes activity of metals and metal oxide nanomaterials: applications from biotechnology to medicine and environmental engineering

(2021) 19:26 Alizadeh and Salimi J Nanobiotechnol https://doi.org/10.1186/s12951-021-00771-1 Journal of Nanobiotechnology Open Access REVIEW Multienzymes activity of metals and metal oxide nanomaterials: applications from biotechnology to medicine and environmental engineering Negar Alizadeh1 and Abdollah Salimi1,2* Abstract With the rapid advancement and progress of nanotechnology, nanomaterials with enzyme-like catalytic activity have fascinated the remarkable attention of researchers, due to their low cost, high operational stability, adjustable catalytic activity, and ease of recycling and reuse. Nanozymes can catalyze the same reactions as performed by enzymes in nature. In contrast the intrinsic shortcomings of natural enzymes such as high manufacturing cost, low operational stability, production complexity, harsh catalytic conditions and difficulties of recycling, did not limit their wide applications. The broad interest in enzymatic nanomaterial relies on their outstanding properties such as stability, high activity, and rigidity to harsh environments, long-term storage and easy preparation, which make them a convenient substitute instead of the native enzyme. These abilities make the nanozymes suitable for multiple applications in sensing and imaging, tissue engineering, environmental protection, satisfactory tumor diagnostic and therapeutic, because of distinguished properties compared with other artificial enzymes such as high biocompatibility, low toxicity, size dependent catalytic activities, large surface area for further bioconjugation or modification and also smart response to external stimuli. This review summarizes and highlights latest progress in applications of metal and metal oxide nanomaterials with enzyme/multienzyme mimicking activities. We cover the applications of sensing, cancer therapy, water treatment and anti-bacterial efficacy. We also put forward the current challenges and prospects in this research area, hoping to extension of this emerging field. In addition to therapeutic potential of nanozymes for disease prevention, their practical effects in diagnostics, to monitor the presence of SARS-CoV-2 and related biomarkers for future pandemics will be predicted. Keywords: Nanozyme, Metal, Metal oxide, Sensing and biosensing, Cancer, Therapeutic, Diagnostics Introduction Enzymes, as biological macromolecules, are mainly composed of proteins, which can efficiently and selectively catalyze a diverse biochemical reactions [1, 2]. They play a notable function in various fields, such as energy production processes, biosensing, the food industry, and *Correspondence: 1 Department of Chemistry, University of Kurdistan, 66177‑15175 Sanandaj, Iran Full list of author information is available at the end of the article biofuels [3–6]. However, they have some drawbacks, such as product complexity, harsh catalytic conditions and low operational stability because of digestion and denaturation. In addition, it has high costs in preparation and purification [7, 8]. To address these issues, nanomaterial with enzyme-like characteristics (nanozyme) was applied as a novel alternative candidate. Artificial enzymes have attracted the significant attention of researchers due to their higher stability, low cost, flexibility and tunable catalytic activities [9–11]. Compared with other artificial enzymes, nanozymes possess outstanding properties © The Author(s) 2021. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativeco mmons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/ zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. Alizadeh and Salimi J Nanobiotechnol (2021) 19:26 such as their size and structure dependent catalytic activities, multi enzyme activity, large surface area, smart response and self-assembly capability [12, 13]. On the basis of these outstanding properties, nanozymes have been widely utilized for disease diagnosis and treatment, chemical sensing, environmental protection and antibacterial agents [7, 14–17]. Up to now, lots of nanomaterials have been uncovered to mimic several natural enzymes, such as peroxidase, oxidase, catalase, superoxide dismutase (SOD), phosphatase, nuclease, esterase, protease and ferroxidase [18]. Since the finding of Fe3O4 nanoparticles as peroxidase mimics in 2007 [19], a large amount of studies on metal and metal oxide nanozymes have been reported. For example, Au, Pt, Pd, Co3O4, CeO2, CuO, M nO2, NiO, V 2O5 nanocomposites have been shown to possess a unique enzyme-like property [20–28]. Metal and metal oxide nanomaterial played great role in progress and development of enzyme mimic technology, due to their unique combination of redox chemistry, optical and electrical properties [29–32]. Interestingly, some nanomaterial can mimic the function of two or three enzymes. It has been reported that the simultaneous expression of multiple enzymes is more effective than single expression to remove harmful reactive oxygen species [33]. When designing a cascade reaction, it is often appropriate to use multiple nanozyme as the cascade catalyst. In this review, we present a comprehensive review of applications of metal and metal oxide nanozyme in terms of chemical sensing and biosensing, cancer treatment, water purification and anti-bacterial efficiency (Table 1). We also highlight some recent examples of multi-enzyme applications in catalysis. Because of the space limit, we could not cover all the related publications. However, we summarize recent research works on metal and metal oxide based nanozyme in Table 1. In the last section, the current challenges and future opportunities of metal and metal oxide-based nanozymes are also discussed. We hope that the present review will be of great benefit for development of novel nanozymes in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology and nanotechnology. Nanozymes for sensing application Metal and metal oxide-based nanozymes with substantial properties have been widely applied for several analytical purposes. The principle detection is divided into two categories: (1) the target activates or deactiv (...truncated)