Herein, we propose a novel approach of employing molybdenum disulfide nanoflakes as inherently electroactive labels for the detection of DNA hybridization.

Graphene related materials have been widely employed as highly efficient transducers for biorecognition. Here we show a conceptually new approach of using graphene oxide nanoplatelets (50 × 50 nm) as voltammetric inherently active labels for specific protein-target molecule recognition. This proof-of-principle is demonstrated by biotin–avidin recognition, which displays that graphene oxide nanoplatelet labels show excellent selectivity. Therefore, it is expected that inherently electroactive graphene oxide nanoplatelet labels will play a similar role as electroactive gold nanoparticle labels which were developed more than a decade ago.