Nanozyme-based sensing platforms for detection of toxic mercury ions: An alternative approach to conventional methods

Abstract

Mercury (Hg) is known as a poisonous heavy metal which stimulates a wide range of adverse effects on the human health. Therefore, development of some feasible, practical and highly sensitive platforms would be desirable in determination of Hg2+ level as low as nmol L?1 or pmol L?1. Different approaches such as ICP-MS, AAS/AES, and nanomaterial-based nanobiosensors have been manipulated for determination of Hg2+ level. However, these approaches suffer from expensive instruments and complicated sample preparation. Recently, nanozymes have been assembled to address some disadvantages of conventional methods in the detection of Hg2+. Along with the outstanding progress in nanotechnology and computational approaches, pronounced improvement has been attained in the field of nanozymes, recently. To accentuate these progresses, this review presents an overview on the different reports of Hg2+-induced toxicity on the different tissues followed by various conventional approaches validated for the determination of Hg2+ level. Afterwards, different types of nanozymes like AuNPs, PtNPs for quantitative detection of Hg2+ were surveyed. Finally, the current challenges and the future directions were explored to alleviate the limitation of nanozyme-based platforms with potential engineering in detection of heavy metals, namely Hg2+. The current overview can provide outstanding information to develop nano-based platforms for improvement of LOD and LOQ of analytical methods in sensitive detection of Hg2+ and other heavy metals.