Efectrochemical Determination Of Prednisolone At Ordered Mesoporous Carbon Modified Electrode:Application To Doping Monitoring

Carbon materials have always been the friendliest of materials in the activities of humankind. Carbon materials have been widely used in both analytical and industrial electrochemistry, where they serve as electrodes materials. The often-cited advantages of carbon electrodes include low cost, wide potential window, relatively inert electrochemistry, and electrocatalytic activity for a variety of redox reactions. These outstanding characteristics have been attracting researchers around the world to develop new carbon-based electrode materials which meet the needs of the modern electrochemical applications such as the electrochemical sensing and biosensing devices. Ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) is a new kind of carbon nanostructure material, which has been receiving much attention owing to its extremely well-ordered pore structure, high specific pore volume, high specific surface area, tunable pore diameters in the mesopore range, and the high density of edge plane defect sites (EDSs), which make it suitable for applications in catalysis and sensing.During this study, a sensitive and reliable electrochemical method based on square wave voltammetry and using ordered mesoporous carbon modified glassy carbon (OMC/GC) electrode was developed for the determination of prednisolone, a corticosteroid abused for doping in sports. The results show that the OMC/GC electrode exhibited a significant catalytic response towards the reduction of prednisolone by increasing the reduction peak currents and lowering the reduction potential compared to the bare GC electrode. Under optimum experimental conditions, the peak current was linear to the concentration of prednisolone in the range0.06-40μM. The method has a sensitivity of0.644μA μM-1and the detection limit (3S/m) of0.057μM. It was successfully used to determine the content of prednisolone in pharmaceutical formulation and spiked human urine, and prednisolone can be determined without any interference from the common urine metabolites. The rapidity and simplicity of this method make it a promising way to detect the cases of doping even at the sites of competitive games.