Polyaniline and Copper based nanometal surface energy transfer probe for efficient turn-on bovine serum albumin sensing

In the present study, we have investigated the energy transfer mechanism owing to the interaction between colloidal Cu nanorods and polyaniline as a function of varying amounts of Cu. XRD, FESEM, and HRTEM examined the sample's structural and morphological characteristics, and the optical characteristics were explored by UV-Vis absorbance, photoluminescence, and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements. The steady-state photoluminescence exhibits quenching behaviour and time-resolved photoluminescence measurements exhibit lifetime reduction in accordance with the nanometal surface energy transfer theory, following 1/d4 distance dependency from polyaniline to the surface of Cu. With the increasing quencher (Cu) concentration, quenching efficiency and rate of energy transfer increase, whereas a decrease in the distance between Cu and polyaniline has been observed. Our research attempts to see if such nanohybrid comprising polymer-noble metal nanoparticles could be used as sensitive biosensors. Hence, the nanohybrid system consisting of Cu and polyaniline has been employed in the potential bovine-serum albumin sensing, which showed an excellent detection limit of 15.3 nM. The Cu- PANI pair also exhibits excellent selectivity amidst the other possible interfering compounds.