Due
to their effective catalytic activity and maximum atom utilization,
single metal atoms dispersed in carbon matrices have found diverse
applications in electrocatalysis, photocatalysis, organic catalysis,
and biosensing. Herein, iron is atomically dispersed into nitrogen-doped
porous carbon aerogel by a facile pyrolysis procedure, and the resulting
nanocomposite behaves both as a peroxidase mimic for the sensitive
detection of glucose by fluorescence spectroscopy and as an effective
catalyst for the electrochemical oxidation of glucose. The glucose
concentration can be quantified within the millimolar to micromolar
range with a limit of detection of 3.1 and 0.5 μM, respectively.
Such a dual-functional detection platform also shows excellent reproducibility,
stability, and selectivity, and the performance in glucose detection
of clinical and artificial human body fluids is highly comparable
to that of leading assays in recent studies and results from commercial
sensors. Results from this study suggest that carbon aerogel-supported
single atoms can be used as a dual-functional nanozyme for the construction
of low-cost, high-performance dual-signal readout platforms for glucose
detection.