Mechanism of mercury detection based on interaction of single-strand DNA and hybridized DNA with gold nanoparticles.

Mechanisms of interaction of single-strand DNA and hybridized DNA on gold nanoparticles in the presence of Hg(2+) was studied in this work. Recently the detection of Hg(2+) using unmodified gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) combined with DNA is becoming a promising technique with the advantages of simplicity, cost-effectiveness and high sensitivity. However, few studies focused on the interaction of ssDNA and hybridized DNA on AuNPs to date.