With the growth of the global economy and population, the demand for energy is increasing sharply. The development of environmentally a benign and reliable energy supply is very important and urgent. Single-walled carbon nanohorns (SWCNHs), which have a horn-shaped tip at the top of single-walled nanotube, have emerged as exceptionally promising nanomaterials due to their unique physical and chemical properties since 1999. The high purity and thermal stability, combined with microporosity and mesoporosity, high surface area, internal pore accessibility, and multiform functionalization make SWCNHs promising candidates in many applications, such as environment restoration, gas storage, catalyst support or catalyst, electrochemical biosensors, drug carrier systems, magnetic resonance analysis and so on. The aim of this review is to provide a comprehensive overview of SWCNHs in energy applications, including energy conversion and storage. The commonly adopted method to access SWCNHs, their structural modifications, and their basic properties are included, and the emphasis is on their application in different devices such as fuel cells, dye-sensitized solar cells, supercapacitors, Li-ion batteries, Li-S batteries, hydrogen storage, biofuel cells and so forth. Finally, a perspective on SWCNHs’ application in energy is presented.

A single-walled carbon nanohorn (SWCNH) has been used to construct a molecularly imprinted electrochemical sensor for the first time. Kanamycin, a widely used aminoglycoside antibiotic, is used as a representative analyte to test the detection strategy. The kanamycin sensor was constructed by the electropolymerization of a molecularly imprinted poly-o-phenylenediamine film on a SWCNH modified glassy carbon electrode. The sensor was investigated in the presence or absence of kanamycin by cyclic voltammetry to verify the changes in the redox peak currents of K₃Fe(CN)₆. The sensor exhibits a linear range of 0.1–50 μM with a detection limit of 0.1 μM. It also shows high recognition ability, indicating that the SWCNH-based molecularly imprinted sensor is promising.

A GSH sensing platform using lucigenin as a fluorescent probe in the presence of MnO ₂ nanosheets was reported for the first time.

Metal nanoclusters (NCs), including Au, Ag, Cu, Pt, Ni and alloy NCs, have become more and more popular sensor probes with good solubility, biocompatibility, size-dependent luminescence and catalysis. The development of electrochemiluminescent (ECL) and chemiluminescent (CL) analytical methods based on various metal NCs have become research hotspots. To improve ECL and CL performances, many strategies are proposed, from metal core to ligand, from intermolecular electron transfer to intramolecular electron transfer. Combined with a variety of amplification technology, i.e., nanostructure-based enhancement and biological signal amplification, highly sensitive ECL and CL analytical methods are developed. We have summarized the research progresses since 2016. Also, we discuss the current challenges and perspectives on the development of this area.