Zirconia Hybrid Nanoshells for Nutrient and Toxin Detection

Abstract

Monitoring milk quality is of fundamental importance in food industry, because of the nutritional value and resulting position of milk in daily diet. The detection of small nutrients and toxins in milk is challenging, considering high sample complexity and low analyte abundance. In addition, the slow analysis and tedious sample preparation hinder the large‐scale application of conventional detection techniques. Herein, zirconia hybrid nanoshells are constructed to enhance the performance of laser desorption/ionization mass spectrometry (LDI MS). Zirconia nanoshells with the optimized structures and compositions are used as matrices in LDI MS and achieve direct analysis of small molecules from 5 nL of native milk in ≈1 min, without any purification or separation. Accurate quantitation of small nutrient is achieved by introducing isotope into the zirconia nanoshell‐assisted LDI MS as the internal standard, offering good consistency to biochemical analysis (BCA) with R2 = 0.94. Further, trace toxin is enriched and identified with limit‐of‐detection (LOD) down to 4 pm, outperforming the current analytical methods. This work sheds light on the personalized design of material‐based tool for real‐case bioanalysis and opens up new opportunities for the simple, fast, and cost‐effective detection of various small molecules in a broad field.

Plasmonic Alloys Reveal a Distinct Metabolic Phenotype of Early Gastric Cancer

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Sustainable Carbon Materials toward Emerging Applications

“…[ 148 ] Fe 3 O 4 was found with property of peroxidase‐mimicking in 2007, [ 149 ] leading to its broad range of biomedical applications. [ 150–152 ] The successful development of Fe 3 O 4 also triggers the developing transition metal‐based nanozymes and noble metal based nanozymes as well as their biomedical applications, such as Co, [ 153 ] Zr, [ 154 ] V, [ 155 ] Pt, [ 156 ] and Au. [ 157 ] Notably, the well‐designed carbon nanomaterials are considered as ideal candidates for nanozyme and have exhibited with enhanced biocatalytic performance as peroxidase mimics, superoxide dismutase (SOD) mimics and hydrolase mimics.…”

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