Molybdenum disulfide nanosheet induced reactive oxygen species for high-efficiency luminol chemiluminescence

Background: Luminol chemiluminescence (CL) sensing system remains an excellent candidate for application in bioanalysis due to its good water solubility. However, traditional luminol CL system usually requires the addition of oxidizing agents and sensitizers to obtain high efficiency for the improvement of detection sensitivity. Although numerous studies on the nanomaterial-enhanced luminol CL systems have been carried out, there is still great potential to develop inexpensive, readily available and easily handled catalysts to construct simple and effective CL platform for biomolecular sensing. Results: Few-layered MoS2 nanosheets (NS) prepared by sonication-assisted exfoliation of commercially available bulk MoS2 were found to significantly enhance the CL of luminol-dissolved oxygen in the absence of additional oxidants. The mechanism study demonstrated that exfoliated MoS2 NS could catalyze the decomposition of dissolved oxygen by virtue of its exposed active sites on the surface, generating increased reactive oxygen intermediates, which then oxidize luminol and produce intense CL emission. The proposed high-efficiency luminol CL system was then employed for the extremely sensitive identification of dopamine based on the quenching of