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“Background Owing to their higher catalytic activity, better selectivity, and longer stability than Pd and Pt catalysts, the catalysis of gold nanoparticles (Au NPs) in liquid-phase reactions has become the subject of increasing interest in recent years [1–15]. It has been proven that smaller

Au NPs show higher catalytic activity as they have much greater surface to volume ratio [16–18]. However, small Au NPs easily aggregate to minimize their surface area, resulting in a remarkable reduction in their catalytic activity [19, 20]. Immobilizing Au NPs onto solid supports to form composite catalysts is regarded as a practical strategy to solve this problem [21–26]. For liquid-phase reactions, the catalysts need to be separated easily from the MK-1775 cell line mixture for recycling. Among various kinds of supports with different nanostructures, porous magnetic composite nanomaterials have aroused considerable attention since they could satisfy two requirements simultaneously: high surface area and facile recycle [22–24, 27–31]. The high surface area comes from the hierarchically porous structure which provides enough exposure of the composite catalysts to the reactants. The facile recyclability results from the magnetic nature of the composite

catalysts, Gemcitabine research buy which enables fast separation of the solid catalysts from the reaction mixture by applying an external magnet. Several strategies have been developed to immobilize Au NPs onto/into the magnetic composite supports [27–35]. Generally, Au NPs are pre-synthesized and then incorporated into the modified supports. Ge et al. reported the synthesis of a nanostructured hierarchical composite composed of a central magnetite/silica composite core and many small satellite silica spheres [6]. Au NPs were immobilized on the silica satellites through gold-amine complexation. The obtained supported gold catalysts showed fast magnetic separation ability and high catalytic activity for 4-nitrophenol reduction. Deng et al. deposited Au NPs onto modified Fe3O4@SiO2 microspheres followed by a surfactant-assembly sol-gel process and synthesized multifunctional Fe3O4@SiO2-Au@mSiO2

microspheres with well-defined core-shell nanostructures, confined catalytic Au NPs, and accessible ordered mesopore channels [7]. However, most of these methods are tedious and time-consuming. Recently, Zheng et DOK2 al. successfully developed an approach to in situ load Au NPs on Fe3O4@SiO2 magnetic spheres [8]. After the Fe3O4@SiO2 magnetic nanoparticles were firstly prepared, AuCl4 – was introduced to the surface and then reduced by Sn2+ species that were linked to the surface of the Fe3O4@SiO2 precursor. The synthesis step and the reaction cost were remarkably decreased. Despite of these researches, in situ fabrication is limited [25, 36–39], and it is still a challenge to develop an efficient and facile method to immobilize Au NPs in solid magnetic supports without compromising the catalytic activity.