Dioxins are highly toxic to humans and environment, and developing the effective methods to control and detect the organic pollutant is particular important. Here we performed a density functional theory (DFT) study on the adsorption of 2, 3, 7, 8-tetrachlorodibenzofuran (TCDF) molecules on the modified graphene substrates. The results indicated that the introducing of vacancy-defect and dopants (Mn and Fe) significantly improves the sensitivity toward TCDF molecules. The impurity played a crucial role for interacting with TCDF molecules. Furthermore, the adsorption of TCDF induced band-gap open in defected graphene substrates, which could be seen as electric signal to detect TCDF pollutant. The present study is expected to be useful to explore effective materials to detect and remove dioxin pollutants based on graphene. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.