Porous Molybdenum Carbide Nanostructured Catalyst toward Highly Sensitive Biomimetic Sensing of H<sub>2</sub>O<sub>2</sub>
Juan Li, Chun Tang, Taotao Liang, Chuyue Tang, Xiaohui Lv, Kanglai Tang, Chang Ming Li
Abstract
Abstract There are great challenges to fabricate a highly selective and sensitive enzyme‐free biomimetic sensor. Herein for the first time a unique nanostructure of porous molybdenum carbide impregnated in N‐doped carbon (p‐Mo 2 C/NC) is synthesized by using SiO 2 nanocrystals‐templating method and is further used as an enzyme‐free electrochemical biosensor toward highly selective, sensitive detection of H 2 O 2 , of which the limit of detection, dynamic detection range and sensitivity accomplish as 0.22 μM, 0.05–4.5 mM and 577.14 μA mM −1 cm −2 , respectively, and are much superior to the non‐porous molybdenum carbide impregnated in N‐doped carbon (Mo 2 C/NC). The sensor is also used to monitor H 2 O 2 released from A549 living cells. This work holds a great promise to be used to monitor the presence of H 2 O 2 in biological research while offering an important knowledge to design a highly selective and sensitive biomimetic sensor by synthesizing a porous catalyst to greatly improve the reaction surface area rather than conventionally only relying on dispersing the catalyst material into porous carbon substrate.