Alcohol oxidase-driven in situ synthesis of BSA-stabilized copper nanoclusters for precise monitoring of methyl mercaptan in food samples

Owing to lack of the effective chromogenic groups, a convenient, precise, and real-time assay for the detection of methyl mercaptan (CH 3 SH) still remains many huge challenges, but it is of great importance to the food and agribusiness related industries. In this work, we proposed an interesting and efficient fluorescence sensing strategy-based alcohol oxidase (AOX)-triggered in situ synthesis of bovine serum albumin-stabilized copper nanoclusters (BSA-CuNCs) for sensitive and selective detection of CH 3 SH. In the presence of CH 3 SH, AOX-assisted O 2 could catalyze it to be H 2 O 2 , which could further trigger BSA-Cu 2+ system to in situ synthesize of BSA-CuNCs, emitting fluorescence signals. On this basis, CH 3 SH concentration-dependent fluorescence emission of BSA-CuNCs was observed, thus allowing for developing a novel fluorescence sensing platform for reporting the levels of CH 3 SH with a broad linear range from 1.0 to 300.0 μM and a low detection limit of 0.19 μM. More significantly, we exploited this sensing strategy to monitor CH 3 SH in real ham samples with acceptable results. This work gives a new insight into applying in situ synthesis strategy to develop a new category of fluorescence sensing platform, achieving convenient, low-cost, reliable, and precise measurements in real food and agriculture-related systems, thereby manifesting a promising potential in food safety monitoring.