Electrochemical signal response for vitamin B1 using terbium luminescent nanoscale building blocks as optical sensors

A luminescent terbium complex was covalently modified onto anisotropic gold nanostructures (nanoparticles and nanorods) respectively. Two novel emissive gold nanoprobes were successfully developed for selective and rapid determination of vitamin B1 in water. More significantly, electrochemical sensing performances were investigated based on green emissive gold nanoparticles and nanorods which were fabricated by anchoring gold nano-sensors on the surface of glassy carbon electrodes. Both the fluorescence spectra and cyclic voltammetry curves exhibited selective signal changes in the presence of vitamin B1 in comparison with vitamin B2, B3, B4, B5 and B6. It is considered to be the first example that different dimensional fluorescent nano-probes were selected and applied as dual opto-electrochemical sensors for recognizing the same analyte.