Multicenter uric acid biosensor based on tetrapod-shaped ZnO nanostructures.

In this work, we developed a tetrapod-shaped ZnO nanostructure (T-ZnO) biosensor to determine uric acid (UA), which is the primary end product of purine metabolism. The as-fabricated UA sensor presents a higher performance than that of the reported biosensors based on ZnO nanorods and ZnS quantum dots, etc. High-quality ZnO nanotetrapods were characterized by field emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectra (EDX), X-ray diffraction (XRD) and Raman spectroscopy, respectively. A high affinity of uricase/ZnO to UA was revealed by cyclic voltammograms. The biosensor performance has been systematically investigated by amperometric response measurements. A fast current response time is within 9 s. It was also found that the uricase/T-ZnO biosensor presented a high and reproducible sensitivity of 80.0 microA cm(-2) mM(-1) and an experiment limit of detection of 0.8 microM. This study provides an insight utilizing the unique ZnO nanostructure to develop the highly sensitive and rapidly responsive nano-bio devices.