Engineering the nanozyme hydrogel beads by polyvinyl alcohol/chitosan encapsulation with recyclable and sustainable...

Hydrogen peroxide (H₂O₂) plays a vital role in human health and have been regarded as a crucial analyte in metabolic processes, redox transformations, foods research and medical fields. Especially, the long-time and excessive digestion of H₂O₂ may even cause severe diseases. Although conventional instrumental methods and nanozymes-based colorimetric methods have been developed to accomplish the quantitative analysis of H₂O₂, the drawbacks of instrument dependence, cost-effectiveness, short lifespan, non-portable and unsustainable detection efficacies will limit their applications in different detection scenarios.

Herein, to address these challenges, we have proposed a novel strategy for nanozyme (RuO₂) hydrogel preparation by the solid support from cross-linked polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and chitosan (CS) to both inherit the dominant peroxidase-like (POD) activity and protect the RuO₂ from losing efficacies. Taking advantages from the hydrogel, the encapsulated RuO₂ were further prepared as the regularly spherical beads (PCRO) to exhibit the sustainable, recyclable, and robust catalysis. Moreover, the intrinsic color interferences which originated from RuO₂ can be avoided by the encapsulation strategy to promote the detection accuracy. Meanwhile, the high mechanical strength of PCRO shows the high stability, reproducibility, and cyclic catalysis to achieve the recyclable detection performance and long lifetime storage (40 days), which enables the sensitively detection of H₂O₂ with the detection limit as lower to 15 μM and the wide detection linear range from 0.025 to 1.0 mM.

On the basis of the unique properties, PCRO has been further adopted to construct a smartphone detection platform to realize the instrument-free and visual analysis of H₂O₂ in multi-types of milk and real water samples through capturing, processing, and analyzing the RGB values from the colorimetric photographs. Therefore, PCRO with the advanced detection efficacies holds the great potential in achieving the portable and on-site analysis of targets-of-interest.