An App for the Electrochemical Detection of Manganese in Water

• Krunal Patel
• Veronica Garcia
• Jude Vazhappilly
• Ulises Sosa

Manganese (Mn) is a critical element necessary for many enzymatic functions in the body. However, long term exposure to high levels of manganese can lead to neurological disorders and impair mental development. Manganese exposure can come from air, food, or water. Therefore it is critical to detect high levels of manganese in drinking water. Current analytical methods for detecting manganese concentrations are atomic absorption spectroscopy (AAS) or inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (ICPMS) which require specialized, bulky, expensive equipment and a centralized lab. Getting the sample shipments to the lab and receiving results increases the turnaround time upwards to six months. Dr. Ian Papautsky’s lab is developing electroanalytical sensors that for the first time could be used at the point-of-care for determination of manganese. Electroanalytical sensors offer numerous benefits as they are inexpensive, portable, and easily miniaturized. In conjunction with the Papautsky lab, our team is developing an app, Ion-U, to automate and simplify electrochemical detection of trace levels of manganese in water. As a standalone app, Ion-U provides an user-friendly interface that displays step-by-step instructions throughout the entire detection process. It controls a customized four-channel potentiostat to simultaneously perform the electrochemical detection in all channels and shortens the detection time to 16 minutes from the current approach that takes over one hour. Ion-U can also perform data analysis and display the measured concentration of manganese. This user-friendly and time saving app will ease manganese exposure detection, and could potentially be extended to detection of other metals or adapted to measurements in different sample matrices.