SE988: Harnessing Nature’s redox chemistry for Sustainable redox flow batteries and beyond

The transition to renewable energy requires scalable, sustainable, and high-performance energy storage technologies beyond conventional lithium-ion batteries. Redox flow batteries (RFBs) are particularly attractive for grid-scale applications because they decouple energy and power, but their widespread deployment depends on the development of stable, low-cost, and molecularly tunable redox-active electrolytes. Nature provides a vast yet largely unexplored library of structurally diverse secondary metabolites that have evolved to mediate efficient electron-transfer chemistry, offering new opportunities for the design of organic redox materials.This presentation highlights our efforts to establish nature-derived secondary metabolites as a new platform for organic electrolytes in RFBs. We focus on fungal perylenequinones produced through fermentation, which exhibit highly reversible multi-electron redox chemistry, excellent chemical stability, and tunable electrochemical properties. By combining electrochemistry, spectroscopy, computation, and coordination chemistry, we establish molecular design principles governing reduction potential, charge transport, and long-term cycling stability. These studies demonstrate how biosynthetically accessible molecular scaffolds can be rationally engineered into high-performance organic electrolytes for sustainable energy storage.Building on these design principles, we are extending this bioinspired strategy to lithium-sulfur (Li-S) batteries through the investigation of sulfur-rich organopolysulfide secondary metabolites. These naturally occurring architectures exhibit unique electrochemical behavior and show promise as redox comediators for improving sulfur utilization and cycling performance.Together, this work establishes secondary metabolites as an emerging molecular platform for next-generation electrochemical energy storage while illustrating how nature-inspired molecular design can accelerate the development of sustainable battery technologies beyond lithium-ion systems.