High oxidase-mimic activity of Fe nanoparticles embedded in an N-rich porous carbon and their application for sensing of dopamine

The N-doped porous carbon (NC) has been regarded as one of the promising support materials for nanoparticles (NPs) catalyst due to its inherent virtues such as porosity, large surface areas, and heteroatom incorporation. In this work, Fe/NC-800 hybrid was facilely prepared by uniform dispersion of in situ formed FeNPs onto NC-800 from carbonization of ZIF-8 at 800 °C for the first time. The optimized Fe/NC-800 catalyst was characterized by TEM, XPS and XRD. Compared with sole FeNPs and NC-800, the Fe/NC-800 catalyst exhibited an enhanced oxidase-like activity that could oxidize the colorless 3,3',5,5'-tetramethylbenzidine (TMB) to the heavy blue without extra oxidants such as H2O2. The possible reason for the enhanced oxidase-like activity of the Fe/NC-800 was discussed on the basis of the experiments of radical scavengers, indicating the importance of superoxide (O2•-) and singlet (1O2) in colorimetric reaction between TMB and Fe/NC-800 hybrid. Furthermore, the oxidase-like activity of Fe/NC-800 was significantly inhibited by dopamine (DA), leading to blue color fading. On this basis, a sensitive and selective colorimetric sensor was fabricated for the quantitative analysis of DA with a linear range of 0.01-40 μM and a low detection limit of 10 nM. The proposed colorimetric method was successfully applied to determine DA in human serum and injection samples, suggesting a promising application in biological analysis.