Highly sensitive and portable mercury(ii) ion sensor using personal glucose meter

Abstract

In this paper, a highly sensitive and portable mercury(II) ion sensor based on personal glucose meter (PGM) recording is proposed. Thymine–thymine mismatches in the capture and detection of DNA were used to recognize target Hg²⁺. Magnetic separation and hydrolysis of sucrose into glucose of DNA-invertase conjugation were employed to obtain the PGM signal. There was a linear relationship between the PGM signal and the concentration of Hg²⁺ in the range of 8.0 nM to 1 μM. A correlation coefficient of 0.995 was obtained and the relative standard deviation was 3.6% for a concentration of 100 nM Hg²⁺ (n = 9). The selectivity and performance of the Hg²⁺ sensor in lake water, tap water and river water were also studied, which suggested our method has a great potential to be used in real applications.