The Functional Fe 3 O 4 @SiO 2 @AuNPs SERS Nanomaterials for Rapid Enrichment and Detection of Mercury Ions in Licorice.

There has been an increasing demand for rapid and sensitive techniques for the detection of heavy metal ions that are harmful to the human body in traditional Chinese medicine (TCM). However, the complex chemical composition of TCM makes the quantitative detection of heavy metal ions difficult. In this study, the magnetic Fe₃O₄@SiO₂@AuNPs nanoparticles combined with a probe molecule DMcT were used for the specific enrichment and detection of Hg²⁺ in the complex system of licorice. The core of Fe₃O₄ was bonded with SiO₂ to increase its stability. A layer of AuNPs was deposited to produce a "core–shell" Raman substrate with high surface-enhanced Raman spectroscopy (SERS) activity, which was surface modified by DMcT probe molecules with sulfhydryl groups. In the presence of Hg²⁺, Hg²⁺ binds to N on the amino group of DMcT to form N-Hg²⁺-N complexes, which induces Fe₃O₄@SiO₂@AuNPs-DMcT clustering to enhance SERS signal. The Raman probe molecule DMcT showed an excellent linear relationship (R² = 0.9709) between the SERS signal at 1416 cm⁻¹ and the Hg²⁺ concentration (0.5~100 ng/mL). This method achieved a good recovery (89.10~111.00%) for the practical application of detection of Hg²⁺ in licorice extracts. The results demonstrated that the functional Fe₃O₄@SiO₂@AuNPs-DMcT performed effective enrichment and showed high sensitivity and accurate detection of heavy metal ions from the analytes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]