Defect‑engineered graphene nanoribbons based molecularly imprinting voltammetric sensor for sensitive determination of interleukin-6

As an important proinflammatory cytokine, interleukin-6 (IL-6) possesses great influence in the treatment of several diseases (e.g. acute pancreatitis and infections) and regulation of immune, thus it's necessary to develop a simple and sensitive method for IL-6 detection. In this work, by preparing defect‑engineered graphene nanoribbons (EGr) as substrate material of sensor and using 1,2-diaminobenzene as the functional monomer, a simple and sensitive molecularly imprinted polymer (MIP) voltammetric sensor was successfully designed via simple electropolymerization method to detect IL-6. Because of the superior electrical property coupled with large surface area of EGr and high specific-recognition of MIP, the as-designed MIP sensor exhibits wide linearity (0.1–1000 pg mL−1) and low analytical limit for IL-6 (0.025 pg mL−1) via optimizing various influencing factors. In addition, the as-designed voltammetric MIP sensor exhibits superior repeatability and long-term stability as well as real application performances. The yielded acceptable performances based on the developed MIP sensor reveal it could realize simple and sensitive detection of IL-6 as a novel sensing platform.