Advanced Sensing of Antibiotics with Magnetic Gold Nanocomposite: Electrochemical Detection of Chloramphenicol

The sensing and accurate determination of antibiotics in various environments represents a big challenge, mainly owing to their widespread use in medicine, veterinary practice, and other fields. Therefore, a new, simple electrochemical sensor for the detection of antibiotic chloramphenicol (CAP) has been developed in this work. The amplification strategy of the sensor is based on the application of magnetite nanostructures stabilized with carboxymethyl cellulose (Fe3O4-CMC) and decorated with nanometer-sized Au nanoparticles (NPs) (Fe3O4-CMC@Au). In this case, CMC serves as a stabilizing agent, preventing the aggregation of Fe3O4 NPs, and hence, enabling the kinetic barrier for electron transport to be overcome, and the Au NPs serve as an electron-conducting tunnel for better electron transport. As a proof of concept, the developed nanosensor is used for the detection of CAP in human urine samples, giving a recovery value of around 97%, which indicates the high accuracy of the as-prepared nanosensor.