Benefiting from Both Ethanol Oxidation and Bidentate Thiol Groups of DHLA Ligands under Photoirradiation for Synthesis of Au Nanoparticles With Their Catalytic and Peroxidase Like Activity

In this work, we rationally synthesized quite stable gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) using dihydrolipoic acid (DHLA) and DHLA-aspartame (DHLA-Asptm) as both reducing and stabilizing agents in a mixture of water/ethanol at RT under photoirradiation in 10 min. The novelty of this work is that benefiting from both the oxidation of ethanol to ethanal and having the bidentate thiol groups of DHLA, stable DHLA@AuNPs and DHLA-Asptm@AuNPs were successfully and rapidly formed without additional reducing reagents. We systematically examined the formation of DHLA@AuNPs and DHLA-Asptm@AuNPs under different pH values and reaction temperatures. Furthermore, the salt tolerance of DHLA@AuNPs and DHLA-Asptm@AuNPs was tested in a series of sodium chloride solutions. We showed the catalytic and peroxidase-like activities of DHLA@AuNPs against 4-nitrophenol and 3,3′,5,5′-tetramethylbenzidine. The AuNPs were characterized by UV–vis spectrophotometry, scanning transmission electron microscopy, zeta potential, and dynamic light scattering.