Lucigenin-Tris(2-carboxyethyl)phosphine Chemiluminescence for Selective and Sensitive Detection of TCEP, Superoxide Dismutase, Mercury(II), and Dopamine.

Abstract

Development of simple and effective chemiluminescence (CL) systems for multiple sensing applications is significantly important but still a challenge. Until now, the majority of CL systems primarily utilized hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as coreactant, which is limited in its stability and selectivity due to the easy decomposition of H2O2 in the presence of several ions. In this study, we develop a new and intense CL system by combined use of tris(2-carboxyethyl)phosphine (TCEP), a highly solution stable and pH-tolerant tertiary phosphine, with lucigenin for the first time. The effective pairing leads to a significant ∼23 times CL enhancement over classic the lucigenin-H2O2 system without employing additional catalysts. By virtue of this fascinating platform, a sensitive CL method has been developed for the multiple detection of TCEP (LOD = 70 nM), lucigenin (LOD = 4.0 nM), superoxide dismutase (LOD = 0.8 ng/mL), Hg2+(LOD = 0.3 nM), and dopamine (LOD = 3.0 nM), with a linear range of 0.1-320 μM, 0.01-55 μM, 0.005-0.5 μg/mL, 1.0-600 nM, and 0.01-0.8 μM, respectively. Remarkably, this CL method exhibited superior selectivity over several potential interferents. Moreover, the proposed method achieved excellent recoveries in the range of 94.0-102.3% for both Hg2+ detection in lake water and dopamine detection in human serum real samples. We envision that broad applications of TCEP may lead to construct new CL systems, pushing forward for efficient detection of various analytes.