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JPhys energy 4(4), 044011 (2022). doi:10.1088/2515-7655/ac98df, Published by IOP Publishing, Bristol

Application of natural products as new green agrochemicals with low average lifetime, low concentration doses, and safety is both complex and expensive due to chemical modification required to obtain desirable physicochemical properties. Transport, aqueous solubility, and bioavailability are some of the properties that have been improved using functionalized metal-organic frameworks based on zinc for the encapsulation of bioherbicides (ortho-disulfides). An in situ method has been applied to achieve encapsulation, which, in turn, led to an improvement in water solubility by more than 8 times after 2-hydroxypropyl-beta-cyclodextrin HP-beta-CD surface functionalization. High-resolution high-angle annular dark-field scanning transmission electron microscopy (HR HAADF-STEM) and integrated differential phase contrast (iDPC) imaging techniques were employed to verify the success of the encapsulation procedure and crystallinity of the sample. Inhibition studies on principal weeds that infect rice, corn, and potato crops gave results that exceed those obtained with the commercial herbicide Logran. This finding, along with a short synthesis period, i.e., 2 h at 25 degrees C, make the product an example of a new generation of natural-product-based herbicides with direct applications in agriculture., This work was financially supported by the "Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad" (Project AGL2017-88083-R), Spain. Furthermore, this work has received financial support from Junta de Andalucia (FQM334), MINECO/FEDER (Projects MAT2017-87579-R). This project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under Grant 823717-ESTEEM3. STEM studies were performed at the DME Facilities of SCCYT of the University of Cadiz

Resumen del trabajo presentado al Microscopy at the Frontiers of Science Congress Series (MFS), celebrado en el Parque de las Ciencias de Granada (España) del 11 al 13 de septiembre de 2019.

The gram-scale synthesis, stabilization, and characterization of well-defined ultrasmall subnanometric catalytic clusters on solids is a challenge. The chemical synthesis and X-ray snapshots of Pt02 clusters, homogenously distributed and densely packaged within the channels of a metal-organic framework, is presented. This hybrid material catalyzes efficiently, and even more importantly from an economic and environmental viewpoint, at low temperature (25 to 140 °C), energetically costly industrial reactions in the gas phase such as HCN production, CO2 methanation, and alkene hydrogenations. These results open the way for the design of precisely defined catalytically active ultrasmall metal clusters in solids for technically easier, cheaper, and dramatically less-dangerous industrial reactions.