Chemical synthesis of nanoparticles of nickel telluride and cobalt telluride and its electrochemical applications for determination of uric acid and adenine

[Display omitted] •NiTe and CoTe nanoparticles are synthesized by chemical method at room temperature.•Linear response ranges for UA and AD are 3–200μM and 3–50μM for NiTe/GP.•At NiTe/GP the detection limits of UA and AD are 95nM and 206nM respectively.•Limit of detection (LOD) for UA is 0.875μM at CoTe/GP.•Both the electrodes show satisfactory results in clinical samples Nickel telluride (NiTe) and cobalt telluride (CoTe) nanocrystallites were synthesized from homogeneous reaction mixtures of tartrate complex of Ni2+/Co2+ and Te4+ at room temperature by reduction with sodium borohydride. The morphology and the structure of the synthesized particles were characterized by XRD, FESEM, TEM and EDX. The nanocrystallites have shown narrow size distribution with diameter 10.8nm and 3.8nm for NiTe and CoTe respectively. The electrochemical properties of the synthesized materials were carried out by cyclic voltammetry (CV) and differential pulse voltammetry (DPV). NiTe modified graphite paste electrode (NiTe/GP) showed electrocatalytic oxidation towards uric acid (UA) and adenine (AD) and two well separated oxidation peaks were obtained in DPV measurement. The peak separation between UA and AD was 633mV. Under optimized experimental condition, the linear response ranges for the determination of UA and AD were 3–200μM and 3–50μM for NiTe/GP and the detection limits (S/N=3) were 95nM and 206nM respectively in the mixture. CoTe modified graphite paste electrode (CoTe/GP) displayed electrocatalytic oxidation towards uric acid (UA) only. Both the modified electrodes were used in human urine and blood sample analysis with better sensitivities than earlier reports.