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The viability of a sustainable energy cycle, such as the one depicted below, depends tremendously on the availability of efficient catalysts that can help the transformation of the fundamental reactions involved. To be efficient, a catalyst needs to be cheap, fast and selective. Over the last few years our group has reported Fe and Co based bio-inspired catalysts designed utilizing our current understanding of geometric and electronic structure function relationships of key metallo-enzyme active sites like cytochrome P450, cytochrome c oxidase, photosystem II and hydrogenases etc. By mimicking the quintessential attributes of these metal-enzyme active sites in synthetic and bio-synthetic model complexes reactivities such as, selective catalytic oxidation of cyclohexane to cyclohexanol using molecular O2 at RT and pH 7 with >8000 turnovers, reduction of H+ to H2 with rates >1011M-1s-1, turnover number > 1 billion at pH ≤3.0, water oxidation at pH 7 with no over potential, selective reduction of O2 to H2O at pH 7 with rates in excess of 107 M-1s-1, have been reported. Additionally, in-situ investigation of catalysts using different spectroscopic techniques have revealed limitations of these catalysts which has not only helped develop these catalysts but also have aided developing new designing principles that have allowed development of catalysts for selective reduction of H+ in the presence of O2, CO, S2- with zero overpotential.
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