Solid State Porphyrin Based Mercury Ion Sensors

Among the heavy metals, mercury is often considered the most toxic; moreover, current methods used to sense and quantitate mercury in the environment are expensive and labor intensive. In response, the sensor community has sought new approaches to detect and quantitate mercury. One such approach is the use of porphyrins as selective reagents for the detection of mercury. Porphyrins have shown great promise in sensing applications because of their intense absorptions in the visible region, fluorescence properties, rich redox chemistry and most importantly selective, reversible association with mercury ions. In this review, we presented some of the most remarkable developments with porphyrin based solid state sensors over the past ten years (2006-2015) for the recognition and sensing of mercury (II) ions in aqueous solution. Attention is focused on the synthetic route, the immobilization scheme used to associate the porphyrin with a solid support, the spectroscopic method used to sense mercury ions, and the limit of detection for the sensor. Received date: 10/11/2015 Accepted date: 27/11/2015 Published date: 30/11/2015 *For Correspondence Darrell R. Fry, Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas, USA, Tel: 9364681406 E-mail: [email protected]/[email protected]