Biologically Assisted Construction of Advanced Electrode Materials for Electrochemical Energy Storage and Conversion

Bio-organisms with various architectures and versatile physiological functions provide a substantial bibliography for electrode design. To elucidate how bio-organisms and bio-schemes take effect in advanced electrode materials, this review sorts bio-assisted construction into two categories, namely, biotemplating synthesis and biomimetic artificial fabrication. The former section summarizes unique characteristics of different biotemplates for electrode preparation, including "bottom-up" structural designability of biomolecules, metabolism involving, and genetic alterable properties of biological cells, as well as, the structural regularity and integrity of bio-tissues, with the aim to provide guidelines for manipulating bioarchitectures and endow biotemplating synthesis of electrodes with more designability. The later describes recent efforts in using bio-prototypes to enhance the essential properties associated with advanced electrodes, including mechanical properties, wettability, mass transport, electron/charge transfer, and catalytic activity, with intensive concerns on the function principles of biomimetic designs in electrochemical systems. Then, advances in applications of bioderived and biomimetic electrode materials are summarized emphasizing how bio-structures/components and bionic designs help to enhance the charging/discharging and electrocatalytic performance in specific electrochemical energy storage and conversion systems. Finally, future trends with prospects and challenges for developing new bioderived/biomimetic electrode materials, as well as, related conceptual innovation on bionics, are discussed in the last section.