ABSTRACT
Nature is the greatest engineer and the main source of all inspiration throughout. Natural enzymes, the heart of a living organism, are ubiquitous in nature and direct most biological processes as active biocatalysts with high substrate affinity and specificity under mild reaction conditions. Increasing understanding of the general principles as well as the intrinsic drawbacks of natural enzymes, including low operational stability; high costs in preparation, purification, and storage; and sensitivity of catalytic activity toward environmental conditions, has triggered a dynamic field in nanotechnology, biochemistry, and materials science that aims at joining the better of the three worlds by combining concepts adapted from nature with the processability of catalytically active carbon-based nanomaterials (CNMs) as nanozymes. Nanozyme, a term coined by Manea et al. (2004), is an exciting and promising topic in biomimetics that has ignited considerable research efforts recently to rationally design and execute functional CNMs as enzyme mimetics for a wide variety of technological applications.
