Electrochemical deposition of crosslinked oxo-cyanoruthenate, Ru-O/CN-O, from a mixture of RuCl3 and K4Ru(CN)(6) is known to yield a film on glassy carbon that promotes oxidations by a combination of electron and oxygen transfer. Layer-by-layer (LbL) deposition of this species at a film formed by cycling of the electrode potential in a ZrO2 solution systematically increases the number of catalytically active sites of the Ru-O/CN-O on the electrode. The evaluation of the electrocatalytic activity was by cyclic voltammetric oxidation of cysteine at pH 2. Plots of the anodic peak current vs. the square root of scan rate were indicative of linear diffusion control of this oxidation, even in the absence of ZrO2, but the slopes of these linear plots increased with bilayer number, n, of (ZrO2 vertical bar Ru-O/CN-O)(n). The latter observation is hypothesized to be due to an increased number of active sites for a given geometric electrode area, but proof requires further study. To optimize utilization of the catalyst and to provide a size-exclusion characteristic to the electrode, the study was extended to LbL deposition of the composite in 50-nm pores of an organically modified silica film deposited by electrochemically assisted sol-gel processing using surface-bound poly(styrene sulfonate) nanospheres as a templating agent. (C) 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.