Single-atom Fe catalytic amplification-gold nanosol SERS/RRS aptamer as platform for the quantification of trace pollutants.

Bisphenol A (BPA), as a typical endocrine disruptor, poses a serious threat to human health. Therefore, it is urgent to establish a rapid, sensitive, and simple method for the determination of BPA. In this paper, based on the aptamer-mediated single-atom Fe carbon dot catalyst (SA_Fe) catalyzing the HAuCl₄-ethylene glycol (EG) nanoreaction, a new SERS/RRS di-mode detection method for BPA was established. The results show that SA_Fe exhibits a strong catalytic effect on the HAuCl₄-EG nanoreaction, which could generate purple gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) with resonance Rayleigh scattering (RRS) signals and surface-enhanced Raman scattering (SERS) effects. After the addition of BPA aptamer (Apt), it could encapsulate SA_Fe through intermolecular interaction, thus inhibiting its catalytic action, resulting in the reduction of AuNPs generated and the decrease of RRS and SERS signals of the system. With the addition of BPA, Apt was specifically combined with BPA, and SA_Fe was re-released to restore the catalytic ability; the generated AuNPs increased. As a result of this RRS and SERS signals of the system recovered, and their increment was linear with the concentration of BPA. Thus, the quantification of 0.1–4.0 nM (RRS) and 0.1–12.0 nM (SERS) BPA was realized, and the detection limits were 0.08 nM and 0.03 nM, respectively. At the same time, we used molecular spectroscopy and electron microscopy to study the SA_Fe-HAuCl₄-ethylene glycol indicator reaction, and proposed a reasonable SA_Fe catalytic reaction mechanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]