Artificial hydrogenases: biohybrid and supramolecular systems for catalytic hydrogen production or uptake

There is an urgent need for cheap, abundant and efficient catalysts as an alternative to platinum for hydrogen production and oxidation in (photo)electrolyzers and fuel cells. Hydrogenases are attractive solutions. These enzymes use exclusively nickel and iron in their active sites and function with high catalytic rates at the thermodynamic equilibrium. As an alternative, a number of biomimetic and bioinspired catalysts for H-2 production and/or uptake, based on Ni, Fe and Co, have been developed and shown to display encouraging performances. In this review we discuss specifically recent approaches aiming at incorporating these compounds within oligomeric and polymeric hosts. The latter are most often biological compounds (peptides, proteins, polysaccharides, etc.) but we also discuss non-biological scaffolds (synthetic polymers, Metal-organic-Frameworks, etc.) which can provide the appropriate environment to tune the activity and stability of the synthetic catalysts. These supramolecular catalytic systems thus define a class of original compounds so-called artificial hydrogenases.