Electrochemical sensing platform based on kelp-derived hierarchical meso-macroporous carbons.

In this paper, kelp (Laminaria japonica), as a kind of abundant biomass, is used as the precursor for the preparation of kelp-derived hierarchical meso-macroporous carbons (K-dHMMCs) through the carbonization under nitrogen (N) atmosphere at high temperature. The K-dHMMCs exhibits the unique structure with high specific surface area of 416.02 m g, large pore volume of 0.24 cm g, the hierarchical meso-macroporous size distribution centered at 2, 12 and 82 nm and high density of defective sites, enabling K-dHMMCs attractive for the electrocatalysis. Drop-casting K-dHMMCs on the glassy carbon (GC) surface allows the construction of K-dHMMCs based electrochemical sensing platform, which shows electrocatalytic activities towards many electroactive molecules, such as potassium ferricyanide, nicotinamide adenine dinucleotide (NADH), hydrogen peroxide (HO), dopamine (DA), uric acid (UA), ascorbic acid (AA), epinephrine (EP), l-tyrosine (Tyr) and acetaminophen (APAP). Especially, the K-dHMMCs modified GC (K-dHMMCs/GC) electrode exhibits higher sensitivity, wider linear range, and lower detection limit than both carbon nanotubes modified GC (CNTs/GC) and GC electrodes for HO detection, which makes the K-dHMMCs/GC electrode to be able to determine the HO levels in human urine sample and monitor the HO released from human cancer cells. These results demonstrate that K-dHMMCs/GC possesses a great potential for conventional electrochemical sensing applications.