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Updated: May 12, 2026
An Anaerobic Biosensor Assay for the Detection of Mercury and Cadmium
Published on: December 17, 2018
A NIR Molecular-level Framework Tracks Mercury Ions via Fast and Real-time Determination in Real Samples and Live
Miaoyuan Zhang1,2, Xiaole Chen3, Zhijie Luo3
1School of Chemistry, Guangzhou Key Laboratory of Analytical Chemistry for Biomedicine, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510006, P. R. China. miaoyuan0722@pdsu.edu.cn.
None:
Bio-degradation of mercury ions and their abnormal bioaccumulation in the human body through the food chain can cause various diseases. Therefore, we have designed and synthesized a novel near-infrared (NIR) ratiometric fluorescent probe (E)-2-(3-(3-(1,3-dithiolan-2-yl)-4-hydroxystyryl)-5,5-dimethylcyclohex-2-en-1-ylidene)malononitrile (ICM-S-OH) for detecting Hg2+. Due to the Hg2+-promoted deprotection reaction of mercaptal, ICM-S-OH showed rapid response within 3 min, accompanied by a noticeable fluorescence change from yellow emission to red emission and colour change from yellow to pink. The fluorescence intensity ratio (F663/F593) has excellent linearity toward the concentration of Hg2+. The detection limit reaches 5.3 nM. Moreover, the sensing mechanism of ICM-S-OH towards Hg2+ supported by fluorescence, UV-vis, 1H NMR, HR-MS spectra and density functional theory (DFT) calculation. Moreover, Gibbs free energy change of the interaction process were calculated to study the thermodynamics. In particular, ICM-S-OH were further employed to detect Hg2+ in M.D. Anderson Metastatic Breast-231 cells (MDA-MB-231 cells) and seafood samples (shrimp and crab).
