Synergistic Electrochemical Amplification of Ferrocene Carboxylic Acid Nanoflowers and Cu Nanoparticles for Folic Acid Sensing

Abstract

Folic acid (FA) plays an indispensable role in the human body and sometimes needs to be taken as a drug supplement, especially for pregnant women. Herein, an electrochemical FA sensor was constructed by electrodepositing Cu and ferrocene carboxylic acid (Fc(COOH)) on a glassy carbon electrode (GCE), indicating low cost, simple preparation, and short time consumption. Furthermore, field emission scanning electron microscopy illustrates that Fc(COOH) completely covering Cu nanoparticles (CuNPs) grew to be tufts of loose and porous nanoflowers in situ, which produces a large active surface area to adsorb FA. Results verify that two conjected materials exhibited a good synergistic amplification effect on FA signal. Ultimately, a great linear relationship of FA was established between 100.0~1000.0 μM under optimized conditions by differential pulse voltammetry. The limit of detection was 33.3 μM, and the sensitivity was 0.10149 μA·μM-1·cm-2. The sensor Fc(COOH)/CuNPs/GCE showed satisfactory selectivity and stability and could be used for FA detection in FA tablets samples with an average recovery of 91.43~100.68%, and a relative standard deviation less than 3.17%. The consistency and validity were affirmed by comparisons with an ultra-visible spectrophotometer.

A Novel Electrochemical Strategy for Chloramphenicol Detection in a Water Environment Based on Silver Nanoparticles and Thiophene

“…[38][39][40] In particular, the combination of metal nanoparticles and bioactive materials to build electrochemical sensors can realize signal amplification through the synergy effect between them. 41,42 In previous literatures, three redox peaks of CAP (represented by O1, R1 and R2) including redox pair O1/R2 and individual irreversible peak R1 are mainly reported, the corresponding mechanism is proposed as shown in Scheme 1. [43][44][45][46] Amongst, peaks R1 or O1 is often employed to prepare an electrochemical sensor to detect the content of CAP by differential pulse voltammetry (DPV).…”