Liquid Metal pH Morphology Sensor Used for Biological Microenvironment Detection

pH is one of the important parameters of a biological microenvironment, which is closely related to cell growth, development, vitality, division, and differentiation. Monitoring the pH of a microenvironment is helpful to monitor the cell metabolism as well as to understand the cellular life cycle. The sensitivity of liquid metals (LMs) to hydrogen ions has aroused our interest. Here, we propose a novel but facile pH sensor using liquid gallium (LM for short) droplet morphological change as the readout. The pH sensing characteristics of the LM droplet were examined, especially the shape response. LM can form solid native oxide skin rapidly in oxygenated solution, and the oxide layer will be removed in acidic or alkaline solutions, which will cause a great change in surface tension. The phenomenon is the change of LM morphology from macroscopic observation. We explored the electrochemical characteristics of LM at different pH values, explained the mechanism of surface change, and calibrated the relationship curve between LM morphology and pH and the interference of impurity ions on the sensor. Finally, we proposed a detection algorithm for the LM pH morphology sensor and tried to automatically detect pH with a mobile app, which was applied to the pH detection of cell culture solution. We believe that the response characteristics of LM to hydrogen ions have great potential in microenvironment detection.