In vitro experimental study demonstrates efficient electrochemical amino acid synthesis using zinc-fluorine diatomic catalysts, highlighting a sustainable path for producing organonitrogen chemicals.
While electrocatalytic C─N coupling offers a promising route for amino acid synthesis, its efficiency is limited by complex reaction pathways and competitive adsorption of reactants and intermediates on single‐site catalysts. Herein, we report a catalyst with F and Zn diatomic sites on MnO 2‐x that enables the efficient synthesis of various amino acids from keto acids and nitrate through electrocatalytic C─N coupling in neutral electrolytes. For alanine synthesis, this catalyst exhibits a high Faradaic efficiency (FE) of 76.25% and a production rate of 543.02 µmol cm −2 h −1 across a broad potential window from –0.3 to –1.3 V RHE , while maintaining stable operation for over 300 h. In a membrane electrode assembly reactor, the catalyst sustains stable alanine production for 200 h with an average FE of 70.86%, enabling the practical isolation of 44.72 g of alanine. In situ spectroscopic and theoretical calculations demonstrate a tandem catalytic cascade, in which nitrate reduction proceeds to NH 2 OH on MnO 2‐x , NH 2 OH then spontaneously condenses with keto acids adsorbed on Zn sites to form C═N oxime intermediates, and these oximes migrate to F sites for hydrogenation to amino acids. This work offers insights into diatomic‐site design for amino acid electrosynthesis and promotes the sustainable production of high‐value organonitrogen compounds.
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Yu et al. (2026) studied this question.
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