Fe3O4 peroxidase mimetics as a general strategy for the fluorescent detection of H2O2-involved systems

•A general H2O2-involved fluorescence system using Fe3O4 as peroxidase mimetics.•Glucose and p-nitrophenol were regarded as models.•Glucose detection had performances of good sensitivity and selectivity.•p-Nitrophenol detection had advantage in simple procedure with high sensitivity.•The system was used for sensing the glucose and p-nitrophenol in real samples.

Enzyme mimetics have recently attracted considerable interest because of their high stability and low cost. We developed a general H2O2-involved fluorescence system using Fe3O4 magnetic microspheres as peroxidase mimetics and benzoic acid (BA) as indicator. Glucose and p-nitrophenol were used as models to determine the characteristics and effectiveness of the system. Glucose oxidase hydrolyzes glucose, in the presence of oxygen, to H2O2 followed by the activation of Fe3O4 MMs, resulting in the catalyzed oxidation of benzoic acid. Glucose can be determined by the quantitative fluorescence production. p-Nitrophenol is determined as model compounds which competes with benzoic acid for H2O2 resulting in the decreased catalytic oxidation of benzoic acid with the Fe3O4 MMs. The detection limit of the Fe3O4/H2O2/BA system is 0.008 μM for H2O2, 0.025 μM for glucose and 0.05 μM for p-nitrophenol. Furthermore, the system had high sensitivity, good selectivity and was capable of sensing glucose in human serum and p-nitrophenol in water samples. The proposed system has great potential in the chemical/biological sensing of a variety of analytes associated with reactions that produce or consume H2O2.

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