An electrochemical sensor based on Pt/α-Fe2O3@RGO nanocomposites for selective detection of the drug ornidazole (ORD) in environmental samples

Abstract

The widespread use of antibiotics for humans and animals leads to the contamination of the water environments. ORD is one of the drugs widely used to treat anaerobic bacterial and protozoal infections. For that, their excessive doses or discharge erroneously be caused serious health issues and facilitate the development of antibiotic resistance in pathogens. Thus, several studies have been developed to monitor the contamination of environmental samples with pharmaceutical products. In this work, a Pt/α-Fe2O3@RGO nanocomposite was synthesized for the rapid and sensitive electrochemical detection of ORD. X-ray diffraction (XRD), Fourier transforms infrared spectroscopy (FT-IR), scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) were used to characterize the prepared nanocomposite. The electrochemical performance of the constructed electrode was examined by electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS), cyclic voltammetry (CV), and square wave voltammetry (SWV). The obtained results indicate that the Pt/α-Fe2O3@RGO nanocomposite achieves excellent electrocatalytic conductivity and rapid electron transfer for the detection of ORD, good reproducibility, storage stability, and reliable selectivity. Additionally, the detection limit of the developed sensor was 15 nM with a sensitivity of 0.277 µA µM−1 cm−2.