Advances in materials science has accelerated the development of diagnostic tools with the last decade witnessing the development of enzyme-free sensors, owing to the improved stability, low cost, and simple fabrication of component materials. However, the specificity of non-enzymatic sensors for certain analytes still represents a challenging task, for example, the determination of cholesterol level in blood is vital due to its medical relevance. In this work, a reagent displacement assay for cholesterol sensing in serum samples was developed. It is based on coating of a glassy carbon electrode with a polymer of intrinsic micro-porosity (PIM) that forms a host-guest complex with methylene blue (MB). In the presence of cholesterol, the MB electroactive probe was displaced due to the stronger association of cholesterol guest to the PIM host. The decrease in the oxidative current was proportional to the cholesterol concentration achieving a detection limit of approximately 0.1 nM.
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Drug abuse considered a serious source of economic and social problems. The sensing of drugs of abuse is of demanding in
forensic and clinical toxicology. There are many various methods for determination these materials using chromatographic and mass
spectrometric techniques. Most of these techniques needs high-cost equipment, time consuming and suffer hard sample preparations.
However, electrochemical methods are easy, simple and no need for complicated sample preparations cause to more interests of their
use for determinations of toxics and pharmaceuticals. On the other hand, use of nanomaterials in electrochemistry found wide attentions to improve selectivity, sensitivity and limit of detections of various compounds such as pharmaceuticals, biologicals and environmental. Nanomaterials draw interests due to their low cost and unique size-dependent properties. The settling of nanomaterials into
different matrices to prepare nanocomposite films founds wide interest. The unique properties of nanomaterials like mechanical, electrical, optical, catalytic and magnetic properties in addition of their significant high surface area per mass make them popular. Besides
the novel properties, nanomaterials demonstrate new approaches to fabricate low cost electrodes by minimizing the materials needed
and waste. The presence of nanotechnology beside modern electrochemical techniques helps to emerge of powerful, reliable electrical
devices for sensing that shows benefits like increasing mass transport rate, high surface area and good control over electrode microenvironment. The aim of this review is to give an outline for the electrochemical determination based on nanomaterials of the commonly
occurring illicit drugs in a various matrices such as urine, blood and saliva, which are important for determining of drugs of abuse.
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