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

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 mu M. 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.