The determination of hydrogen peroxide is of great importance, ascribable to both the fact that it is a product of reactions catalyzed by a large number of oxidase enzymes, and that it is essential in food, pharmaceutical, environmental, and clinical analyses. 1,2 Many analytical methods have been reported for such measurements, including electroanalytical techniques, 3-5 spectrophotometry, 6,7 chemiluminescence, 8,9 and fluorometry.10-12 Among these methods, most are based on the enzyme (peroxidase and catalase) catalytic reaction. Enzymatic determinations of H2O2 have drawn increasing interest due to their unusual sensitivity, selectivity and simplicity. Horse radish peroxidase (HRP), in which the heme iron acts as the activity center, is the most commonly used enzyme in H2O2 detection. However, the instability and high cost of the natural enzyme has stimulated people to search for alternatives. So far, peroxidase mimics that had been applied to the determination of H2O2 have been based on two kinds of substances: one is small bio-molecules from bovine blood, such as hemin and hematin, 10,13,14 and the other is the synthesized metal complexes, such as metal-porphyrin complexes, [15][16][17] metalphthalocyanines. 18,19 However, simple, natural or synthetic metal-complexes do not show satisfactory activity and selectivity because they lack the spatial structure of the natural enzyme, which is essential for the special inclusion behavior between the enzyme and the substrate.Hemoglobin (Hb), a necessary vehicle for oxygen carriage, has the natural quaternary structure. It contains four subunits of polypeptide, and each polypeptide chain contains a heme group that serves as the active center. Thus Hb can be a mimetic enzyme of HRP, 7,20 and the catalytic activity of Hb is much higher than hemin, β-CD-hemin and some metalloporphyrins because Hb has the natural quaternary structure. 7,20 Furthermore, Hb is very stable, and it is worth to mentioning that the price of Hb is 500-times less than that of HRP. There is little doubt that Hb can be effectively substituted for HRP for H2O2 determination. However, to the best of our knowledge, the application of Hb as mimetic peroxidase to a fluorescence analysis of H2O2 has not yet been reported. In this paper, a novel fluorometry for hydrogen peroxide determination is presented, in which hemoglobin (Hb) was used as mimetic enzyme of peroxidase for fluorogenic reaction between an inexpensive substrate thiamine and H2O2. Under the catalysis of Hb, thiamin was oxidized by H2O2 to a fluorescent product, thiochrome, which exhibited strong fluorescence at 440 nm with an excitation wavelength of 370 nm. The obtained result demonstrates that Hb is a promising peroxidase mimic. The applicability of the catalytic reaction was adopted to the determination of H2O2 in rainwater. Satisfactory results were obtained.
Experimental
ReagentsHb (bovine) solutions were prepared by dissolving a certain amount of Hb (Sino-American Biotechnology Co., China) in water and stored in refrigerator (4...