Ultrasensitive Glutathione Detection Based on Lucigenin Cathodic Electrochemiluminescence in the Presence of MnO2 Nanosheets

Glutathione (GSH) is a crucial antioxidant produced endogenously and plays key roles in biological systems. It is vitally important to design simple, selective, and sensitive methods to sense GSH and monitor changes of GSH concentration. In this work, the cathodic electrochemiluminescence (ECL) of lucigenin in the presence of MnO2 nanosheets at a glassy carbon electrode was utilized for GSH detection. GSH can reduce MnO2 nanosheets into Mn2+ which can obviously inhibit the ECL of lucigenin. The ECL inhibition efficiencies increase linearly with the concentrations of glutathione in the range of 10 to 2000 nM. The detection limit for GSH measurement is 3.7 nM. This proposed method is highly sensitive, selective, simple, fast, and cost-effective. Moreover, this approach can detect GSH in human serum samples with excellent recoveries, which indicates its promising application under physiological conditions.