The use of a chemiluminescence in the assessment of the nanomaterials antioxidant activity

Nanomaterials are one of the most promising classes of advanced materials with fine-tuned biological activities. This is evidenced by the presence of redox activity of a number of nanoparticles aimed at inhibiting free radicals and/or mimicking the functions of enzymes. At the same time, it is impossible to study the expression of these biological properties without the use of well-standardized, representative techniques that provide availability, high precision, sensitivity, and selectivity of the measured characteristics. A method that satisfies these requirements is chemiluminescence analysis, which is widely used both in clinical analysis and to characterize the antioxidant activity of substances of natural or synthetic origin. Recently, a trend of using chemiluminescence analysis to study the biological activity of nanomaterials has appeared as a suitable alternative to spectroscopic and electrochemical techniques. This review briefly describes the examples of successful applications of chemiluminescence methods to study radical-binding and enzyme-like activities of nanomaterials. We discuss the data about the effect of the used reagents (radical-generating systems, chemiluminescence activators) and experimental conditions on the obtained values characterizing the nanomaterials activity.