Département de chimie moléculaire

Enzyme mimetics have attracted wide interest due to their inherent enzyme-like activity and unique physicochemical
properties, as well as promising applications in disease diagnosis, treatment and monitoring. Inspired
by the attributes of nonheme iron enzymes, synthetic models were designed to mimic their capability and
investigate the catalytic mechanisms. Herein, metal-organic gels (Fe-MOGs) with horseradish peroxidase (HRP)
like Fe-NX structure were successfully synthesized though the coordination between iron and 1,10-phenanthroline-
2,9-dicarboxylic acid (PDA) and exhibited excellent peroxidase-like activity. Its structure-activity relationship
and the in-situ electrochemiluminescence (ECL) detection of H2O2 secreted by Hela cells were further
investigated. The highly dispersed Fe-NX active sites inside Fe-MOGs were able to catalyze the decomposition of
H2O2 into large amounts of reactive oxygen species (ROS) via a Fenton-like reaction under a low overpotential.
Due to the accumulation of ROS free radicals, the luminol ECL emission was significantly amplified. A proof-ofconcept
biosensor was constructed with a detection limit as low as 2.2 nM and a wide linear range from 0.01 to
40 μM. As a novel metal organic gels based enzyme mimetic, Fe-MOGs show great promises in early cancer
detection and pathological process monitoring.