3.3 Catalysis
Catalyst effectiveness is proportional to its exposed surface area, as more sites are available for reaction. To minimize the costs of large volumes of catalytic metal, an economical strategy for catalyst synthesis is to deposit catalytic metal on an inexpensive inert substrate with a high surface area to volume ratio such as carbon or a biotemplate. However, biotemplated catalysts are more efficient; Pd catalyst synthesized from TMV1cys immobilized on a gold substrate in a nanostar configuration increased the reaction rate 68% relative to commercial Pd/C catalyst of comparable size [58]. TMV-templated catalysts are stable and can be recycled with negligible degradation in performance over several cycles [4, 5, 58]. The superior performance of TMV-templated catalyst is attributed primarily to two factors. One, palladium particles mineralized on TMV tend to be more uniform as compared to commercially available palladium catalyst supported on carbon material leading to more efficient catalysis [58, 59]. And secondly, fabrication of palladium on TMV does not use surfactants and capping agents like the synthesis of traditional catalysts that can block active sites [60]. Removal of these surfactants to rescue catalysis is incomplete and adds to the cost of catalyst manufacture. Thus, biotemplated catalysts are both more catalytically- and economically- advantaged in many scenarios.