Porous Molybdenum Carbide Nanostructured Catalyst toward Highly Sensitive Biomimetic Sensing of H2O2

There are great challenges to fabricate a highly selective and sensitive enzyme-free biomimetic sensor. Herein for the first time a unique nanostructure of porous molybdenum carbide impregnated in N-doped carbon (p-Mo 2 C/NC) is synthesized by using SiO 2 nanocrystals-templating method and is further used as an enzyme-free electrochemical biosensor toward highly selective, sensitive detection of H 2 O 2 , of which the limit of detection, dynamic detection range and sensitivity accomplish as 0.22 μM, 0.05–4.5 mM and 577.14 μA mM −1 cm −2 , respectively, and are much superior to the non-porous molybdenum carbide impregnated in N-doped carbon (Mo 2 C/NC). The sensor is also used to monitor H 2 O 2 released from A549 living cells. This work holds a great promise to be used to monitor the presence of H 2 O 2 in biological research while offering an important knowledge to design a highly selective and sensitive biomimetic sensor by synthesizing a porous catalyst to greatly improve the reaction surface area rather than conventionally only relying on dispersing the catalyst material into porous carbon substrate.