Nanomaterial-Based Electrochemical Sensors for Environmental and Biomedical Applications

Abstract

The rapid growth of pharmaceutical industries has led to new biomedical and environmental concerns. There is an urgent need for sensitive, portable and cost-effective sensors for the detection of pharmaceuticals to either track patient overdosing or to monitor the pollutants in the environment. Nanomaterial-based electrochemical sensing technologies can readily tackle the aforementioned problems, which spurred significant research interests recently [1-3]. In this presentation, the synthesis of nanoporous gold and graphene oxide-based nanomaterials for the electrochemical sensing of acetaminophen, naproxen and isoniazid is discussed. The design rationale and the performance of the proposed electrochemical sensors are highlighted. Specifically, the hierarchical nanoporous gold exhibited high sensitivity of 58.16 µAµM−1cm−2 and a low detection limit of 1.01 nM. In addition, it was found that the oxygen content of the graphene-based nanomaterials played a critical role in both sensing of naproxen and isoniazid. The proposed electrochemical sensors were further tested using real samples, which showed their promising applicability in biomedical and environmental applications.[1] J. van der Zalm, S. Chen, W. Huang, and A, Chen, J. Electrochem. Soc., 167 ,037532 (2020).[2] L. Qian, S. Durairaj, S. Prins, and A. Chen, Biosens. Bioelectron., 112836 (2020).[3] L. Qian, A.R. Thiruppathi, R. Elmahdy, J. van der Zalm, and A. Chen, Sensors., 20,1252 (2020).