Regenerable DNA-Functionalized Hydrogels for Ultrasensitive, Instrument-Free Mercury(II) Detection and Removal in Water
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Mercury is a highly toxic environmental pollutant with bioaccumulative properties. Therefore, new materials are required to not only detect but also effectively remove mercury from environmental sources such as water. We herein describe a polyacrylamide hydrogel-based sensor functionalized with a thymine-rich DNA that can simultaneously detect and remove mercury from water. Detection is achieved by selective binding of Hg(2+) between two thymine bases, inducing a hairpin structure where, upon addition of SYBR Green I dye, green fluorescence is observed. In the absence of Hg(2+), however, addition of the dye results in yellow fluorescence. Using the naked eye, the detection limit in a 50 mL water sample is 10 nM Hg(2+). This sensor can be regenerated using a simple acid treatment and can remove Hg(2+) from water at a rate of approximately 1 h(-1). This sensor was also used to detect and remove Hg(2+) from samples of Lake Ontario water spiked with mercury. In addition, these hydrogel-based sensors are resistant to nuclease and can be rehydrated from dried gels for storage and DNA protection. Similar methods can be used to functionalize hydrogels with other nucleic acids, proteins, and small molecules for environmental and biomedical applications.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it