Abstract
Organic electrosynthesis is a versatile and evergreen tool for constructing chemical compounds. However, the study of highly active electrodes has not received enough attention, which limits the further development of organic electrosynthesis. This work introduces a bottom-up route to prepare chitin-derived composite carbon aerogel electrodes (CCAEs), which can be directly used as electrodes in organic electrosynthesis systems. Various metal nanoparticles, such as Pt, Pd, RuO2, Cu and Ni, are well confined in these free-standing and porous CCAEs (M-CCAEs). The linear sweep voltammetry and in-situ Raman tests under electrochemical conditions show that RuO2-CCAEs possess good electrochemical oxidation ability for chlorine anions and good stabilizing effect on the generated chlorine radicals, which can serve as a mediator for the electrochemical C(sp3)-H activation. The combination of M-CCAEs with mediators achieves a series of electrochemical oxidative C(sp3)-H chlorination, bromination, nitration and etherification. Moreover, M-CCAEs promote the electrochemical hydrogen isotope exchange reaction of some important drug molecule structures, such as Ibuprofen, Diclofenac and Zolpidem.
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All data needed to support the findings of this study are included in the main text or in the Supplementary Information. Data supporting the findings of this manuscript are also available from the corresponding author upon request.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (grant no. 2021YFA1500100, A.L.), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 22031008, A.L.), the Science Foundation of Wuhan (grant no. 2020010601012192, A.L.), and the Cultivation Project of Nanchang University (F.L.). The authors would like to acknowledge the Center for Electron Microscopy at Wuhan University for their substantial supports to TEM work. The authors would like to acknowledge Prof. Abhishek Dutta Chowdhury from Wuhan University for advice on the manuscript. The authors would like to acknowledge Prof. Lina Zhang from Wuhan University for advice on this work. Mrs. Lina Zhang sadly passed away on October 17th, 2020, as a result of illness. She proposed an alkali urea system and made a great contribution to the dissolving biomass renewable energy.
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L.L., Y.L., and A.L. conceived and designed the project. L.L. and H.L. performed initial discovery and optimization of reaction conditions. Y.L., X.J., and X.P. prepared the catalysts. L.L. and H.L. performed the study of substrate scope. L.L., Y.L., and H.L. performed mechanistic studies. D.Y., Y.-C.C., and J.-L.C. performed the XAS test and analyzed the data. L.L., Y.L., F.L., and A.L. wrote the manuscript with input from all other authors.
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Lu, L., Li, Y., Li, H. et al. Electrocatalytic C(sp3)-H bond functionalization using biomass-derived electrodes. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69274-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-69274-7
