Polyaniline and Copper based nanometal surface energy transfer probe for efficient turn-on bovine serum albumin sensing

Abstract

In the present study, we have investigated the energy transfer mechanism owing to the interaction between colloidal Cu nanorods and polyaniline as a function of varying amounts of Cu. XRD, FESEM, and HRTEM examined the sample's structural and morphological characteristics, and the optical characteristics were explored by UV–Vis absorbance, photoluminescence, and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements. The steady-state photoluminescence exhibits quenching behaviour and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements exhibit lifetime reduction in accordance with the nanometal surface energy transfer theory, following 1/d4 distance dependency from polyaniline to the surface of Cu. With the increasing quencher (Cu) concentration, quenching efficiency and rate of energy transfer increase, whereas a decrease in the distance between Cu and polyaniline has been observed. Our research attempts to see if such nanohybrid comprising polymer–noble metal nanoparticles could be used as sensitive biosensors. Hence, the nanohybrid system consisting of Cu and polyaniline has been employed in the potential bovine-serum albumin sensing, which showed an excellent detection limit of 15.3 nM. The Cu- PANI pair also exhibits excellent selectivity amidst the other possible interfering compounds.