The photoelectrochemical (PEC) sensing platform presents high sensitivity due to the photoelectrode’s unique signal transducing modality of excitation energy sources of light and readout signal of electricity, and achieves good selectivity through the contribution of recognition units, such as aptamers, enzymes, antibody, etc. However, the complex design process, harsh storage condition, and high cost of these recognition biomolecules limit the sustainable and practical applications of these PEC sensing platforms. The exploration of detection platform in a simple way without loss their sensitivity and selectivity is always a big challenge. In this work, a prototype of recognition biomolecule unit-free photoelectrochemical sensing platform with self-cleaning activity is proposed with TiO2 nanotube photonic crystal (TiO2 NTPCs) materials as photoelectrode, and dopamine (DA) molecule as both sensitizer and target analyte. The unique adsorption between DA and TiO2 NTPCs induces the formation of charge transfer complex, which not only expends the optical absorption of TiO2 into visible light region, thus significantly boosts the PEC performance under illumination of visible light, but also implements the selective detection of DA on TiO2 photoelectrode. This simple but efficient PEC analysis platform presents a low detection limit of 0.15 nM and a good linear relationship in the ranges of 0.001-25 uM for detection of DA, which allows to realize the sensitive and selective determination of DA release from the mouse brain for its practical application after coupled with a microdialysis probe. The DA functionalized TiO2 NTPCs PEC sensing platform opens up a new PEC detection model, without using extra-biomolecule auxiliary, just with target molecule naturally adsorbed on the electrode for sensitive and selective detection, and paves a new avenue for biosensors design with minimalism idea.

Recognition unit-free and self-cleaning photoelectrochemical sensing platform on TiO2 nanotubes photonic crystals for sensitive and selective detection of dopamine

254th National Meeting (2017)

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