A novel hydroquinone-based chemiluminescent biosensing platform for ultrasensitive sensing of α-glucosidase activity

Due to the limitations of the traditional chemiluminescence (CL) mechanism, the currently reported enzyme-catalyzed CL systems suffered from the complex system design and the addition of catalysts and oxidizing agents. Herein, a novel hydroquinone-based CL biosensing platform was developed for the first time, in which the designed substrate S-(4-chlorophenyl) 10-methyl-9,10-dihydroacridine-9-carbothioate (CMDA) could directly react with hydroquinone to produce strong CL in the presence of sodium decylsulfonate. Notably, the rationally designed CL platform did not require catalysts or oxidizing agents. As a proof-of-concept application, the proposed CL platform was employed to monitor α-glucosidase activity in serum samples and evaluate the inhibitory effects of α-glucosidase inhibitors by using α-arbutin as the substrate. The proposed CL platform with easy preparation and simple operation displayed remarkable sensing capability for α-glucosidase with a detection limit of 0.003 U/L. This study not only provided important insights for simplifying the design of CL platform but also provoked the exploration of novel CL substrates as versatile tools in clinical diagnosis.