Stable 3D Structure Research Articles

Selective stabilization of blue phase liquid crystals using spherical and rod-shaped colloidal nanocrystals

Optimizing strategies used for improving the stability and properties of blue phase (BP) liquid crystals directly impact device performance. Various factors ranging from molecular structure to sample size and substrate conditions can influence selective reflection and electro-optics of BPs. More recently, the technique of incorporating colloidal nanoparticle (NP) assemblies has been used to enhance BP ranges. In cubic BPs, disclination networks can act as trapping centers for NPs, reducing the high elastic energy cost of these regions, favoring BP stability. Organization of NPs in the defect regions can sustain stable 3D colloidal structures, widening the scope and applicability of BPs as photonic materials. Physical and chemical properties, size, and shape of the NPs can also determine the utilization of BPs for advanced applications like lasers and high quality displays. In view of this, a mixture of two calamitic chiral compounds in which all three BPs, viz., BPI, BPII, and BPIII, were induced was combined with rod-shaped CdSe/CdS quantum rods (QRs) and spherical CdSe quantum dots (QDs), which were specifically chosen due to their exceptional optical properties. This also provided an opportunity to investigate the effect of the shape of the NPs on the preferential stabilization of the BPs and on the electro-optic Kerr effect. QRs were found to be more efficient in enhancing the overall BP range, with an almost twofold increase of ∼27 °C with ∼0.5 wt. %. On the other hand, with QDs, the BP range showed an initial increase of 20 °C for ∼0.3 wt. %, which, however, decreased with a further increase in QDs. Another major difference is that the Kerr effect was active only in the BPIII in the case of QDs but is measurable in both cubic BPI and BPII in the case of QRs. The results have been described in terms of the organization of the nanocrystals within the defect lines and the lattice orientations imposed by the substrates.

Structure-Function Insights of Jaburetox and Soyuretox: Novel Intrinsically Disordered Polypeptides Derived from Plant Ureases.

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) and intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs) do not have a stable 3D structure but still have important biological activities. Jaburetox is a recombinant peptide derived from the jack bean (Canavalia ensiformis) urease and presents entomotoxic and antimicrobial actions. The structure of Jaburetox was elucidated using nuclear magnetic resonance which reveals it is an IDP with small amounts of secondary structure. Different approaches have demonstrated that Jaburetox acquires certain folding upon interaction with lipid membranes, a characteristic commonly found in other IDPs and usually important for their biological functions. Soyuretox, a recombinant peptide derived from the soybean (Glycine max) ubiquitous urease and homologous to Jaburetox, was also characterized for its biological activities and structural properties. Soyuretox is also an IDP, presenting more secondary structure in comparison with Jaburetox and similar entomotoxic and fungitoxic effects. Moreover, Soyuretox was found to be nontoxic to zebra fish, while Jaburetox was innocuous to mice and rats. This profile of toxicity affecting detrimental species without damaging mammals or the environment qualified them to be used in biotechnological applications. Both peptides were employed to develop transgenic crops and these plants were active against insects and nematodes, unveiling their immense potentiality for field applications.

An Overview of Multimodal Biometrics Using the Face and Ear

In the recent years, we have witnessed the rapid development of face recognition, though it is still plagued by variations such as facial expressions, pose, and occlusion. In contrast to the face, the ear has a stable 3D structure and is nearly unaffected by aging and expression changes. Both the face and ear can be captured from a distance and in a nonintrusive manner, which makes them applicable to a wider range of application domains. Together with their physiological structure and location, the ear can readily serve as supplement to the face for biometric recognition. It has been a trend to combine the face and ear to develop nonintrusive multimodal recognition for improved accuracy, robustness, and security. However, when either the face or the ear suffers from data degeneration, if the fusion rule is fixed or with inferior flexibility, a multimodal system may perform worse than the unimodal system using only the modality with better quality sample. The biometric quality-based adaptive fusion is an avenue to address this issue. In this paper, we present an overview of the literature about multimodal biometrics using the face and ear. All the approaches are classified into categories according to their fusion levels. In the end, we pay particular attention to an adaptive multimodal identification system, which adopts a general biometric quality assessment (BQA) method and dynamically integrates the face and ear via sparse representation. Apart from a refinement of the BQA and fusion weights selection, we extend the experiments for a more thorough evaluation by using more datasets and more types of image degeneration.

Assemble from 0D to 3D: anchored 0D molybdenum carbide on 3D octahedral amorphous carbon with excellent capacitive properties

Molybdenum carbide (Mo2C) is an attractive candidate as the electrode active material of supercapacitors (SCs) due to its low cost, outstanding electrical conductivity and superior chemical stability; however, the aggregation of Mo2C nanoparticles impedes its applications. Herein, zero-dimensional (0D) Mo2C nanoparticles are anchored on three-dimensional (3D) octahedral amorphous carbon (3DPO-Mo2C/C) by a mild and effective method with carbonizing and etching the Cu/Mo-based metal–organic framework. The 3DPO-Mo2C/C displays a large specific surface area, abundant mesopores and stable 3D structure, which not only expose more active reaction sites and shorten diffusion paths for electrolyte ions, but also prevent the aggregation and improve the structure stability of Mo2C nanoparticles. It exhibits an outstanding specific capacitances of 110 and 105 F g−1 in the electrolytes of 6 M KOH and 2 M EMIMA/AN. Employing the active carbon (AC) as counter electrode to assemble a SC with 3DPO-Mo2C/C as work electrode, which delivers higher energy and power densities of 12 Wh kg−1 and 1620 W kg−1, and the specific capacitance remains 91.3% after 6000 cycles. This approach not only prevents the aggregation of Mo2C nanoparticles successfully but also provides a possibility for Mo2C to be used in SCs.

Biomimetic, biocompatible and robust silk Fibroin-MXene film with stable 3D cross-link structure for flexible pressure sensors

Abstract The ever-increasing demand for flexible electronics has considerably stimulated the desire for high-performance, safe, and durable sensing materials. Preparation of flexible active films with biocompatibility and high performance remains a challenge because of the complexities of large-scale production and the use of toxic chemicals. Here we demonstrated flexible silk fibroin@Ti3C2Tx MXene (SF@MXene) biocomposite films with a three-dimensional (3D) cross-link structure, utilizing natural silk fibroin (SF) as a bridging agent to self-assembled two-dimensional (2D) MXene nanosheets into a continuous wave-shaped lamellar macrostructure. The material exhibited good biocompatibility in a cytotoxicity test, thereby reducing the risk when applied to the human body. The SF@MXene biocomposite film provides a biomimetic 3D cross-link structure, resulting in low elastic modulus (1.22 MPa), good sensitivity (25.5 kPa−1), fast response/recovery time (40/35 ms), subtle pressure detection of limit (9.8 Pa), and good stability (3500 cycles). In addition, this pressure sensor can be applied to human health monitoring, including pulse feeling analysis, acoustic sound, deglutition swallowing, and finger motion. The synthesis of the SF@MXene biocomposite film offers a widely applicable material for developing safe and high-performance flexible electronics.

A rheological test to assess the ability of food inks to form dimensionally stable 3D food structures

A method is presented to screen food inks for their ability to form 3D structures of sufficient rigidity to be considered dimensionally stable. The storage modulus and damping factor extracted from an amplitude sweep in oscillatory shear measurements of a food ink are used to characterise rigidity. The storage modulus appears in a dimensionless number representing the ratio of deformation force due to food-structure weight to the force countering deformation due to food-ink rigidity. This dimensionless number and the damping factor form the axes of a graph on which a window of dimensional stability is defined assuming a structural-deformation limit of 5% over 1 h. The graph shows that food inks with higher damping factors require higher storage moduli to form dimensionally stable 3D structures. The window allows food inks with appropriate rigidity to be selected or, given food-ink rheology, suitable structural heights to be estimated to form dimensionally stable 3D structures. • Window of dimensional stability developed to screen food inks for 3D food printing. • Storage modulus and damping factor appropriately represent food-ink rigidity. • Higher damping factors imply higher storage moduli to ensure dimensional stability.

A Generative Neural Network for Maximizing Fitness and Diversity of Synthetic DNA and Protein Sequences.

SUMMARYEngineering gene and protein sequences with defined functional properties is a major goal of synthetic biology. Deep neural network models, together with gradient ascent-style optimization, show promise for sequence design. The generated sequences can however get stuck in local minima and often have low diversity. Here, we develop deep exploration networks (DENs), a class of activation-maximizing generative models, which minimize the cost of a neural network fitness predictor by gradient descent. By penalizing any two generated patterns on the basis of a similarity metric, DENs explicitly maximize sequence diversity. To avoid drifting into low-confidence regions of the predictor, we incorporate variational autoencoders to maintain the likelihood ratio of generated sequences. Using DENs, we engineered polyadenylation signals with more than 10-fold higher selection odds than the best gradient ascent-generated patterns, identified splice regulatory sequences predicted to result in highly differential splicing between cell lines, and improved on state-of-the-art results for protein design tasks.

Role of disordered regions in transferring tyrosine to its cognate tRNA

Aminoacyl tRNA synthetase (AARS) plays an important role in transferring each amino acid to its cognate tRNA. Specifically, tyrosyl tRNA synthetase (TyrRS) is involved in various functions including protection from DNA damage due to oxidative stress, protein synthesis and cell signaling and can be an attractive target for controlling the pathogens by early inhibition of translation. TyrRS has two disordered regions, which lack a stable 3D structure in solution, and are involved in tRNA synthetase catalysis and stability. One of the disordered regions undergoes disorder-to-order transition (DOT) upon complex formation with tRNA whereas the other remains disordered (DR). In this work, we have explored the importance of these disordered regions using molecular dynamics simulations of both free and RNA-complexed states. We observed that the DOT and DR regions of the first subunit acts as a flap and interact with the acceptor arm of the tRNA. The DOT-DR flap closes when tyrosine (TyrRSTyr) is present at the active site of the complex and opens in the presence of tyrosine monophosphate (TyrRSYMP). The DOT and DR regions of the second subunit interact with the anticodon stem as well as D-loop of the tRNA, which might be involved in stabilizing the complex. The anticodon loop of the tRNA binds to the structured region present in the C-terminal of the protein, which is observed to be flexible during simulations. Detailed energy calculations also show that TyrRSTyr complex has stronger binding energy between tRNA and protein compared to TyrRSYMP; on the contrary, the anticodon is strongly bound in TyrRSYMP. The results obtained in the present study provide additional insights for understanding catalysis and the involvement of disordered regions in Tyr transfer to cognate tRNA.

Rheological parameters, thixotropy and creep of 3D-printed calcium sulfoaluminate cement composites modified by bentonite

The structural instability and poor thixotropy of three-dimensional (3D) printing of calcium sulfoaluminate (CSA) cement composites hinder their applicability in the construction field. In this study, the rheological parameters, thixotropy and creep of 3D-printed CSA cement composites containing bentonite are investigated based on shear-rate- and shear-stress-controlled protocols to achieve a stable three-dimensional structure and excellent thixotropy. Experimental results show that a stable 3D structure with excellent thixotropy can be achieved when the content of bentonite is 2%. In this case, the plastic viscosity and dynamic yield stress are lower than 2.50 Pa s and 645.54 Pa, respectively. The correlation between the rheological parameters and thixotropy of 3D-printed CSA cement composites suggests that the actual thixotropy can be predicted by the yield stress. Furthermore, the shear-stress-controlled protocol was implemented to simulate the effect of gravity and test different creep periods of 3D-printed CSA cement composites with bentonite. The improved static yield stress exhibited better effectiveness in resisting structural deformation over time.

Promising Drug Design Strategies: Intrinsically Disordered Proteins

In contrast to the classical paradigm “one sequence - one structure - one function” that a given protein sequence corresponds to a well-defined three-dimensional (3D) structure and an associated function, it was discovered in the 1990s that an increasing number of proteins can be functional in the absence of a stable 3D-structure.

Mapping the RNA Chaperone Activity of the T. brucei Editosome Using SHAPE Chemical Probing.

Mitochondrial pre-mRNAs in African trypanosomes adopt intricately folded, highly stable 2D and 3D structures. The RNA molecules are substrates of a U-nucleotide-specific insertion/deletion-type RNA editing reaction, which is catalyzed by a 0.8MDa protein complex known as the editosome. RNA binding to the editosome is followed by a chaperone-mediated RNA remodeling reaction. The reaction increases the dynamic of specifically U-nucleotides to lower their base-pairing probability and as a consequence generates a simplified RNA folding landscape that is critical for the progression of the editing reaction cycle. Here we describe a chemical mapping method to quantitatively monitor the chaperone-driven structural changes of pre-edited mRNAs upon editosome binding. The method is known as selective 2'-hydroxyl acylation analyzed by primer extension (SHAPE). SHAPE is based on the differential electrophilic modification of ribose 2'-hydroxyl groups in structurally constraint (double-stranded) versus structurally unconstrained (single-stranded) nucleotides. Electrophilic anhydrides such as 1-methyl-7-nitroisatoic anhydride are used as probing reagents, and the ribose 2'-modified nucleotides are mapped as abortive cDNA synthesis products. As a result, SHAPE allows the identification of all single-stranded and base-paired regions in a given RNA, and the data are used to compute experimentally derived RNA 2D structures. A side-by-side comparison of the RNA 2D folds in the pre- and post-chaperone states finally maps the chaperone-induced dynamic of the different pre-mRNAs with single-nucleotide resolution.

The Potential of Fucose-Containing Sulfated Polysaccharides As Scaffolds for Biomedical Applications

Marine environments have a high quantity and diversity of sulfated polysaccharides. In coastal regions brown algae are the most abundant biomass producers and their cell walls have fucosecontaining sulfated polysaccharides (FCSP), known as fucans and/or fucoidans. These sulfated compounds have been widely researched for their biomedical properties, namely the immunomodulatory, haemostasis, pathogen inhibition, anti-inflammatory capacity, and antitumoral. These activities are probably due to their ability to mimic the carbohydrate moieties of mammalian glycosaminoglycans. Therefore, the FCSP are interesting compounds for application in health-related subjects, mainly for developing scaffolds for delivery systems or tissue regeneration. FCSP showed potential for these applications also due to their ability to form stable 3D structures with other polymers able to entrap therapeutic agents or cell and growth factors, besides their biocompatibility and biodegradability. However, for the clinical use of these biopolymers well-defined reproducible molecules are required in order to accurately establish relationships between structural features and human health applications.

LiMII(IO3)3 (MII=Zn and Cd): Two Promising Nonlinear Optical Crystals Derived from a Tunable Structure Model of α‐LiIO3

AbstractExcellent nonlinear optical materials simultaneously meet the requirements of large SHG response, phase‐matching capability, wide transparency windows, considerable energy band‐gap, good thermal stability and structure stability. Herein, two new promising nonlinear optical (NLO) crystals LiMII(IO3)3 (MII=Zn and Cd) are rationally designed by the aliovalent substitution strategy from the commercialized α‐LiIO3 with the perfect parallel alignment of IO3 groups. Compared with parent α‐LiIO3 and related AI2MIV(IO3)6, the title compounds exhibit more stable covalent 3D structure, and overcome the racemic twinning problem of AI2MIV(IO3)6. More importantly, both compounds inherit NLO‐favorable structure merits of α‐LiIO3 and show larger SHG response (≈14× and ≈12×KDP), shorter absorption edge (294 and 297 nm) with wider energy band‐gap (4.21 and 4.18 eV), good thermal stability (460 and 430 °C), phase‐matching behaviors, wider optical transparency window and good structure stability, achieving an excellent balance of NLO properties.

LiMII (IO3 )3 (MII =Zn and Cd): Two Promising Nonlinear Optical Crystals Derived from a Tunable Structure Model of α-LiIO3.

Excellent nonlinear optical materials simultaneously meet the requirements of large SHG response, phase-matching capability, wide transparency windows, considerable energy band-gap, good thermal stability and structure stability. Herein, two new promising nonlinear optical (NLO) crystals LiMII (IO3 )3 (MII =Zn and Cd) are rationally designed by the aliovalent substitution strategy from the commercialized α-LiIO3 with the perfect parallel alignment of IO3 groups. Compared with parent α-LiIO3 and related AI 2 MIV (IO3 )6 , the title compounds exhibit more stable covalent 3D structure, and overcome the racemic twinning problem of AI 2 MIV (IO3 )6 . More importantly, both compounds inherit NLO-favorable structure merits of α-LiIO3 and show larger SHG response (≈14× and ≈12×KDP), shorter absorption edge (294 and 297 nm) with wider energy band-gap (4.21 and 4.18 eV), good thermal stability (460 and 430 °C), phase-matching behaviors, wider optical transparency window and good structure stability, achieving an excellent balance of NLO properties.

A taurine-functionalized 3D graphene-based foam for electrochemical determination of hydrogen peroxide

We present a synthesis approach of taurine-functionalized graphene foam (a-NSGF) using hydrothermal reduction, freeze-drying and high temperature annealing. The higher temperature in annealing allowed the N/S atoms of taurine enter into the graphene lattice, which improves its electrocatalytic activity greatly. The a-NSGF consisting of taurine that modified into 3D layers of graphene and endow is of the rapid sensitive to hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). The electrode using a-NSGF modification reveals highly sensitive and stable towards the concentration change of H2O2 due to the stable 3D structure and good electrical conductivity of a-NSGF. A linear correlation between H2O2 concentration and the electrochemical signal is found to be in a range from 1.5 to 300 μM and the correlation coefficient is R2 = 0.999. The modified electrode has been applied in the determination of H2O2 in rain samples and the results have been compared with the China National Standard Method. The recoveries range from 94.6% to 106.7%. These results show that the proposed sensor is promising for the development of novel electrochemical sensing for H2O2 determination.

In situ formation of small-scale Ag2S nanoparticles in carbonaceous aerogel for enhanced photodegradation performance

An easy and scalable strategy is introduced to fabricate a series of flexible 3D Ag2S/CA photocatalyst for the degradation of organic dyes and antibiotics. In this design, small-scale Ag2S nanoparticles (NPs) are anchored in a multifunctional carbonaceous aerogel (CA) via in situ ion exchange. The size of the Ag2S NPs is controlled mainly by accurate positioning and adjusting the nucleation. Due to modification with cetyltrimethylammonium chloride (CTAC), the self-seeding nucleation of free Ag+ was avoided by introducing AgNO3 into the solution. The catalytic performance of the Ag2S/CA nanocomposites was evaluated with photodegradable methylene blue (MB) and ciprofloxacin (CIP). The 55wt% Ag2S/CA nanocomposites exhibited markedly higher photodegradation and mineralization abilities (92% removal rate in 210min) toward the target pollutants compared with pure Ag2S nanoparticles and the other weight percentage compounds (Ag2S-to-CA). The MB degradation rate of 55wt% Ag2S/CA was approximately three-fold higher than that of pure Ag2S nanoparticles. Under identical experimental conditions, the degradation process was monitored through UV–Vis absorption spectroscopy, and the degradation pathway of CIP was confirmed by the liquid chromatography–mass spectrometry (LCMS). The stable 3D structure not only improves the adsorption-enrichment capability but also simplifies the separation and recycling processes. The multidimensional mass and electron transfer channels of CA promote the separation and migration of the photogenerated carriers. This study demonstrates a new approach for the preparation of 3D metal sulfide/CA for pollution treatment.

3D pomegranate-like structures of porous carbon microspheres self-assembled by hollow thin-walled highly-graphitized nanoballs as sulfur immobilizers for Li–S batteries

Carbon materials with particular morphologies, structures and sizes are highly desired for different application purposes which can be normally derived from transition metals- and rare earths-based metal organic frameworks (MOFs). However, little is known about MOFs synthesized using main group metals. Herein, we derived a three-dimensional (3D) pomegranate-like structure of porous carbon microspheres (PCMSs) formed by self-assembly of hollow highly-graphitized thin-walled nanoballs by directly carbonizing indium-MOFs (CPM-5). The formation of this unique 3D porous hierarchical structure is closely related to the presence of indium with a low melting point and its effect of catalyzing carbon graphitization, which is demonstrated to be a robust sulfur host for high performance lithium-sulfur (Li–S) batteries. The S/PCMSs electrodes with the areal sulfur loadings of 2.0 and 4.3 mg cm−2 deliver the capacities of 1239 mAh g−1 (742 mAh g−1) at 0.2 C (4 C), and 941 mAh g−1 (480 mAh g−1) at 0.2 C (4 C), respectively, with the low capacity decay rates of 0.014%/cycle over 500 cycles at 4 C, and 0.060%/cycle over 900 cycles at 2C, respectively. The superior performance is attributed to the effective physical confinement of polysulfides as a result of highly dispersed sulfur nanoclusters separated by thin carbon walls, the superior conduction arising from the porous highly graphitized conductive networks and the stable 3D structure due to the compact self-assembly of hollow nanoballs compared to dispersed hollow carbon microspheres or nanoparticles. The unique 3D Pomegranate-like structure as a new morphology and structure enriches the carbon material family which is expected to have other potential applications such as electrode materials for lithium ion batteries, catalysis and chemical adsorption.

Dimension engineering of single-layer PtN2 with the Cairo tessellation

Single-layer PtN2 exhibits an intriguing structure consisting of a tessellation pattern called the Cairo tessellation of type 2 pentagons, which belongs to one of the existing 15 types of convex pentagons discovered so far that can monohedrally tile a plane. Single-layer PtN2 has also been predicted to show semiconducting behavior with direct bandgaps. Full exploration of the structure–property relationship awaits the successful exfoliation or synthesis of this novel single-layer material, which depends on the structure of its bulk counterpart with the same stoichiometry to some extent. Bulk PtN2 with the pyrite structure is commonly regarded as the most stable structure in the literature. But comparing the energies of single-layer PtN2 and bulk PtN2 leads to a dilemma that a single-layer material is more stable than its bulk counterpart. To solve this dilemma, we propose stacking single-layer PtN2 sheets infinitely to form a new bulk structure of PtN2. The resulting tetragonal layered structure is energetically more stable than the pyrite structure and single-layer PtN2. We also find that the predicted bulk structure is metallic, in contrast to the semiconducting pyrite structure. In addition to predicting the 3D structure, we explore the possibility of rolling single-layer PtN2 sheets into nanotubes. The required energies are comparable to those needed to form carbon or boron nitride nanotubes from their single-layer sheets, implying the feasibility of obtaining PtN2 nanotubes. We finally study the electronic structures of PtN2 nanotubes and find that the bandgaps of PtN2 nanotubes are tunable by changing the number of unit cells of single-layer PtN2 used to construct the nanotubes. Our work shows that dimension engineering of PtN2 not only leads to a more stable 3D structure but also to 1D materials with novel properties.

NMR Characterization of Long-Range Contacts in Intrinsically Disordered Proteins from Paramagnetic Relaxation Enhancement in 13 C Direct-Detection Experiments.

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) carry out many biological functions. They lack a stable 3D structure and are able to adopt many different conformations in dynamic equilibrium. The interplay between local dynamics and global rearrangements is key for their function. A widely used experimental NMR spectroscopy approach to study long-range contacts in IDPs exploits paramagnetic effects, and 1 H detection experiments are generally used to determine paramagnetic relaxation enhancement (PRE) for amide protons. However, under physiological conditions, exchange broadening hampers the detection of solvent-exposed amide protons, which reduces the content of information available. Herein, we present an experimental approach based on direct carbon detection of PRE that provides improved resolution, reduced sensitivity to exchange broadening, and complementary information derived from the use of different starting polarization sources.

Synthesis of 3D CQDs/urchin-like and yolk-shell TiO2 hierarchical structure with enhanced photocatalytic properties

A novel CQDs/TiO2 hierarchical structure with enhanced photocatalytic properties was achieved by uniformly decorating urchin-like and yolk-shell TiO2 microspheres (UYTMs) with carbon quantum dots (CQDs) through an environmentally friendly hydrothermal process. The CQDs were firstly synthesized by the electrochemical method, and the TEM, Raman and PL characterizations strongly indicated that the as-prepared CQDs exhibited good dispersion, high crystallinity and unique up-conversion properties. The UYTMs synthesized by a NaOH-assisted hydrothermal process showed stable 3D hierarchical structure and large surface area, which was beneficial for light absorption and contacting with contamination. The good combination of CQDs and UYTMs was further successfully achieved during the hydrothermal process, and demonstrated by a series of tests. The photocatalytic experiments suggested that the CQDs/UYTMs exhibited better photocatalytic activities than the pure UYTMs and P25 under both visible and UV light irradiation. The CQDs/UYTMs combining with 6 wt% of CQDs showed the best photocatalytic efficiency, while excessive CQDs tended to inhibit the photocatalytic activity. According to the results and discussions, a possible mechanism in improving the photocatalytic efficiency of the CQDs/UYTMs is significantly proposed. The up-conversion property of CQDs can broaden the absorption spectrum of CQDs/UYTMs to the visible light. Moreover, the CQDs, as the electron reservoirs, are efficient to separate the electrons and holes, leading to an improved photocatalytic activity of CQDs/UYTMs.