Engineers develop lead ion sensor with ‘unprecedented sensitivity’

Developed by a team at the University of California San Diego, the device reportedly achieves a record limit of detection of lead down to the femtomolar range, which is one million times more sensitive than previous sensing technologies. The work is described in a paper published in Nano Letters.

“With the extremely high sensitivity of our device, we ultimately hope to detect even the presence of one lead ion in a reasonable volume of water,” said Prabhakar Bandaru, a professor in the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering. “Lead exposure is a serious health concern, and it has been indicated that a lead concentration at the level of parts per billion in drinking water could lead to pernicious outcomes, such as stunted human growth and development.”

The device consists of a single layer of graphene mounted on a silicon wafer. The researchers enhanced the sensing capabilities of the graphene layer by attaching a linker molecule to its surface that serves as the anchor for an ion receptor and lead ions.