An electrochemiluminescence sensor for ultrasensitive determination of tyrosine based on ceria nanomaterial as a novel luminophor

Backgroud

Recently, optical nanomaterials have attracted much attention in the field of electrochemiluminescence (ECL). Nanostructured ceria possessed unique optical properties, and it's always used for constructing ECL sensor as catalyst for improving sensing performance, while the ECL property of ceria is rarely studied. In fact, it could be the potential candidate for applying in ECL sensors based on size and shape dependency optical property caused by the quantum scale effects. Therefore, new simple and efficient ceria nanomaterial used as luminophor for constructing the ECL sensor have aroused more research interest and motivation. (91 words).

Results

In the work, three kinds of nanostructured ceria, ceria nano-cube (CeO₂-NC), ceria nano-rods (CeO₂-NR) and ceria nano-particle (CeO₂-NP), have been prepared by hydrothermal method, and CeO₂-NC with the less oxygen vacancy has the highest ECL signal. Moreover, how the shape affects the ECL property was investigated in detail, especially the oxygen vacancy on the surface of the ceria. The less of oxygen vacancy content of CeO₂ nanomaterials is more favorable the ECL reaction. Furthermore, a novel ECL sensor was constructed based on reduced graphene oxide (rGO), Au nano-particle (AuNPs) and CeO₂-NC for Tyrosine (Tyr) determination owing to the electron transform between the luminous of ceria and Tyr resulting in the cathodic ECL intensity quenched correspondingly, and it has possessed excellent sensing performance with a linear range of 0.005–20 nmol/L and the limit of detection (LOD) value of 1.7 fmol/L (141 words)

Significance and novelty

The proposed method demonstrated excellent selectivity and ultra-sensitivity toward Tyr, which had been used for the determination of Tyr in human serum successfully, possessing outstanding analytical performance. Therefore, nanostructured ceria is a new category of efficient and promising luminophore, which would open new avenues for the potential application in the field of ECL sensing for clinical diagnosis. (57 words).