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It is highly desirable but challenging to optimize the structure of photocatalysts at the atomic scale to facilitate the separation of electron-hole pairs for enhanced performance. Now, a highly efficient photocatalyst is formed by assembling single Pt atoms on a defective TiO2 support (Pt1 /def-TiO2 ). Apart from being proton reduction sites, single Pt atoms promote the neighboring TiO2 units to generate surface oxygen vacancies and form a Pt-O-Ti3+ atomic interface. Experimental results and density functional theory calculations demonstrate that the Pt-O-Ti3+ atomic interface effectively facilitates photogenerated electrons to transfer from Ti3+ defective sites to single Pt atoms, thereby enhancing the separation of electron-hole pairs. This unique structure makes Pt1 /def-TiO2 exhibit a record-level photocatalytic hydrogen production performance with an unexpectedly high turnover frequency of 51423 h-1 , exceeding the Pt nanoparticle supported TiO2 catalyst by a factor of 591.

Incorporating atomically dispersed metal species into functionalized metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) can integrate their respective merits for catalysis. A cage-controlled encapsulation and reduction strategy is used to fabricate single Ru atoms and triatomic Ru3 clusters anchored on ZIF-8 (Ru1 @ZIF-8, Ru3 @ZIF-8). The highly efficient and selective catalysis for semi-hydrogenation of alkyne is observed. The excellent activity derives from high atom-efficiency of atomically dispersed Ru active sites and hydrogen enrichment by the ZIF-8 shell. Meanwhile, ZIF-8 shell serves as a novel molecular sieve for olefins to achieve absolute regioselectivity of catalyzing terminal alkynes but not internal alkynes. Moreover, the size-dependent performance between Ru3 @ZIF-8 and Ru1 @ZIF-8 is detected in experiment and understood by quantum-chemical calculations, demonstrating a new and promising approach to optimize catalysts by controlling the number of atoms.