Graphene Oxide Amplified Electrogenerated Chemiluminescence of Quantum Dots and Its Selective Sensing for Glutathione from Thiol-Containing Compounds

Here we report a graphene oxide amplified electrogenerated chemiluminescence (ECL) of quantum dots (QDs) platform and its efficient selective sensing for antioxidants. Graphene oxide facilitated the CdTe QDs(center dot+) production and triggered O-2(center dot-) generation. Then, a high yield of CdTe QDs(star) was formed due to the combination of CdTe QDs(center dot+) and O-2(center dot-), leading to an similar to 5-fold ECL amplification. Glutathione is the most abundant cellular thiol-containing peptide, but its selective sensing is an intractable issue in analytical and biochemical communities because its detection is interfered with by some thiol-containing compounds. This platform showed a detection limit of 8.3 mu M (S/N = 3) for glutathione and a selective detection linear dependence from 24 to 214 mu M in the presence of 120 mu M cysteine and glutathione disulfide. This platform was also successfully used for real sample (eye drug containing glutathione) detection without any pretreatment with a wide linear range from 0.04 to 0.29 mu g mL(-1).