A Multi-Catalytic Sensing for Hydrogen Peroxide, Glucose, and Organophosphorus Pesticides Based on Carbon Dots

In this work, a facile one-pot hydrothermal route was employed to synthesize a series of fluorescent carbon dots (CDs) by using 20 natural amino acids, respectively, as the starting materials. It was found that the CDs synthesized using phenylalanine could possess the intrinsic peroxidase-like activity that could effectively catalyze a traditional peroxidase substrate like 3, 3', 5, 5'- tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) in the presence of H₂O₂ to produce a blue solution; thereby, a catalytic sensing system for H₂O₂ has been developed. On the basis of this catalytic reaction, together with the fact that glucose oxidase (GOx) can catalyze the hydrolysis of glucose to generate H₂O₂, a sensitive catalytic sensing system for glucose could be further established. Furthermore, based on this catalytic reaction, taken together with the two enzymatic catalytic systems of acetylcholinesterase (AChE) and choline oxidase (CHO), a highly sensitive multi-catalytic sensing system could be successfully developed for organophosphorus (OPs) pesticides such as dimethoate, DDVP, and parathion-methyl. Limit of detections (LODs) of H₂O₂ and glucose were estimated to be 6.5 and 0.84 μM, respectively. The limit of detection of the sub-nM level could be obtained for tested dimethoate, DDVP, and parathion-methyl OPs pesticides. The established sensing systems can exhibit good practical application performance in serum and several fruit samples.