Aggregation-induced emission of copper nanoclusters triggered by synergistic effect of dual metal ions and the application in the detection of H2O2 and related biomolecules

Recently, the aggregation-induced emission (AIE) of nanoclusters triggered by metal ions has been received great attentions. However, the good AIE efficiency usually requires excessive metal ions, which may result in an undesired competition between metal ions and targets. In this work, by the synergistic effect of Pb 2+ and Zr 4+ , a fewer amounts of metal ions can induce more aggregates of glutathione-capped Cu nanoclusters (CSH-CuNCs), resulting in a higher AIE efficiency. Next, by virtue of the oxidative property of H 2 O 2 , the AIE of GSH-CuNCs-Pb 2+ -Zr 4+ system quenches linearly with the concentration of H 2 O 2 from 1 to 60 μmol/L. Moreover, many biological substrates, such as glucose and cholesterol, can generate H 2 O 2 in the presence of their specific oxidases and O 2 . Therefore, the detection of glucose or cholesterol can also be achieved by the proposed method, and the limits of detection of glucose and cholesterol are 0.37 and 2.7 μmol/L, respectively. Finally, this method has been validated to be sensitive and selective for glucose or cholesterol detection in human serum samples.