Promoted reactants activation and charge separation leading to efficient photocatalytic activity on phosphate/potassium co-functionalized carbon nitride

Photocatalytic technology has been widely adopted to address the issue of air pollution. The separation of photogenerated carriers and the activation of reactants on catalyst surface are the main factors that affect the photocatalytic efficiency. Here, the phosphate/potassium(PO_4/K) cofunctionalized carbon nitride(labeled as PO_4-CN-K) was synthesized via a one-step in situ copyrolysis of thiourea and potassium phosphate. The unique electronic structure of PO_4-CN-K could significantly improve the performance of photocatalytic NO purification. The enhanced activity of PO_4-CN-K can be attributed to the promoted activation capacity for O_2, NO and H_2O on the catalyst surface,the decreased of carriers recombination, benefiting from the co-functionalization of phosphate groups on the surface of CN and the construction of K channels between CN layers. The photocatalytic NO conversion pathway is disclosed through time-dependent in situ FT-IR, indicating that PO_4-CN-K can efficiently convert NO molecules into harmless nitrate via the NO→NO+→nitrate/nitrite routes. The research provides a novel strategy to impel the development of photocatalytic technology for efficient air purification.

C2Analyzer: Co-target–Co-function Analyzer

MicroRNAs （miRNAs） interact with their target mRNAs and regulate biological processes at post-transcriptional level. While one miRNA can target many mRNAs, a single mRNA can also be targeted by a set of miRNAs. The targeted mRNAs may be involved in different biological processes that are described by gene ontology （GO） terms. The major challenges involved in analyzing these multitude regulations include identification of the combinatorial regulation of miRNAs as well as determination of the co-functionally-enriched miRNA pairs. The C2Analyzer： Co- target Co-function Analyzer, is a Perl-based, versatile and user-friendly web tool with online instructions. Based on the hypergeometric analysis, this novel tool can determine whether given pairs of miRNAs are co-functionally enriched. For a given set of GO term（s）, it can also identify the set of miRNAs whose targets are enriched in the given GO term（s）. Moreover, C2Analyzer can also identify the co-targeting miRNA pairs, their targets and GO processes, which they are involved in. The miRNA miRNA co-functional relationship can also be saved as a .txt file, which can be used to further visualize the co-functional network by using other software like Cytoscape. C2Analyzer is freely available at www.bioinformatics.org/c2analyzer.