Abstract
Nanozymes hold promise for controlling plant bacterial diseases, but conventional ones suffer from low bacterial affinity, inefficient enzyme-like activity, and thus poor antibacterial efficacy. Here, we report a photo-enhanced copper single-atom (CuSA)-loaded ZnS@MoS2 nanozyme with high affinity and efficient peroxidase (POD)-like activity. CuSA-loaded ZnS@MoS2 exhibits higher efficacies against bacterial speck and bacterial wilt diseases in tomatoes, surpassing the commercial thiodiazole copper by 13.33% and 52.77%, respectively. Mechanistically, it catalyzes H2O2 to generate toxic hydroxyl radicals (·OH) via POD-like activity; near-infrared irradiation boosts this activity by lowering activation energy and accelerating mass transfer. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations reveal that CuSA-loaded ZnS@MoS2 captures bacteria via Metal-O-P bonds on cell surfaces, reducing ·OH short-range quenching to enhance efficacy. This SA nanozyme design, integrating intelligent capture and photo-enhanced activity, offers an insight for plant bacterial disease control.
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Data availability
All raw sequence data reported in this paper have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Reading Archive (SRA), with the BioProject login number PRJNA1372983 (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/1372983). DFT computational model data is provided in Supplementary Data 1. Source data are available for Figs. 1e–j, 2a–g, 3c, 4a–c, h, i, 5c, d and Supplementary Figs. 1, 3, 4, 7–12, 14–16, 21b–28b, 30b–32b, 33–39, 40c, d, g, h, 41a–d, g, 42, 43, 44b–d–46b–d, 47, 48b, c, 52–63, 64b, 66, 67b, 68, 69c, 70b, d in the associated source data file. Source data are provided with this paper. All data underlying this study are available from the corresponding author upon request. Source data are provided with this paper.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Scientific Research Project of Higher Education Department of Guizhou Province (Youth Project) (2022-116, L.C.) and the Guizhou University Natural Science Special Post Special Fund (2021-42, L.C.).
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H.J. and L.C. conceived and designed the study and supervised the project. H.J. conducted experiments, analyzed the data, and wrote the initial manuscript. Y.X. and Z.F.M. performed nanomaterial synthesis experiments and antibacterial experiments. L.C., G.J.F., Z.W.L., and S.Y. gave some suggestions for the study and advanced project direction. Z.W.L. provided technical support for both transmission electron microscopy and scanning electron microscopy. All the authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Jiang, H., Xing, Y., Ma, Z. et al. Copper single-atom nanozyme with intelligent capture and photo-enhanced activity for controlling plant bacterial diseases. Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70930-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-70930-1
