Synthesis and Characterization of Graphene Nano-Composites (Graphene Oxide+ CoFe2O4) for Biomedical Applications.

Abstract

Inorganic enzyme mimetics is a burgeoning area of research in field of nanoscience and materials engineering. These artificial inorganic enzyme mimetics provide leverage such as unparalleled flexibility and control over their design chemistry. In addition to this use of these artificial inorganic enzyme mimetics overcome hurdles for instance degradation of natural enzyme activity over a range of temperature, pH and solvents. These inorganic enzyme mimetics also provide improved limit of detection (LoD) with cost effectiveness. In the research work carried out, two types of graphene oxide based cobalt ferrites nanocomposites were synthesized. In order to characterize and to elucidate their peroxidase potential techniques such as XRD, FTIR, SEM, AFM, UV Visible spectroscopy were used. These characterization techniques helped in revealing structural, morphological and chemical nature of designed composites. After this H2O2 was used as peroxide analyte in order to detect the presence and extent of peroxidase like activity of the designed nanocomposites. Effect of dispersion of CoFe on GO sheets, effect of changing pH, temperature and concentration of GO-CoFe nanocomposites was elucidated. Peroxidase like activity was found in both, physical and covalent composites however physical nanocomposite had LoD as 0.3µM in contrast to covalent nanocomposite which had LoD as 0.5µM. Physical GO-CoFe nanocomposite had better dispersion of CoFe particles on GO sheets . Whereas covalent nanocomposite was stable over wide range of pH and temperature. It is anticipated that these enzyme mimetic GO-CoFe nanocomposites can be used as a signal transducer to develop a colorimetric assay for cancer cell detection and could be a powerful tool for wide range of applications in the field of biotechnology and biosensing.