Boosting Electrochemiluminescence Performance of a Dual-Active Site Iron Single-Atom Catalyst-Based Luminol–Dissolved Oxygen System via Plasmon-Induced Hot Holes

Abstract

Due to the commonly low content of biomarkers in diseases, increasing the sensitivity of electrochemiluminescence (ECL) systems is of great significance for in vitro ECL diagnosis and biodetection. Although dissolved O2 (DO) has recently been considered superior to H2O2 as a coreactant in the most widely used luminol ECL systems owing to its improved stability and less biotoxicity, it still has unsatisfactory ECL performance because of its ultralow reactivity. In this study, an effective plasmonic luminol–DO ECL system has been developed by complexing luminol-capped Ag nanoparticles (AgNPs) with plasma-treated Fe single-atom catalysts (Fe-SACs) embedded in graphitic carbon nitride (g-CN) (pFe-g-CN). Under optimal conditions, the performance of the resulting ECL system could be markedly increased up to 1300-fold compared to the traditional luminol–DO system. Further investigations revealed that duple binding sites of pFe-g-CN and plasmonically induced hot holes that disseminated from AgNPs to g-CN surfaces lead to facilitate significantly the luminous reaction process of the system. The proposed luminol–DO ECL system was further employed for the stable and ultrasensitive detection of prostate-specific antigen in a wide linear range of 1.0 fg/mL to 1 μg/mL, with a pretty low limit of detection of 0.183 fg/mL.