Highly sensitive and selective determination of hydrogen sulfide by resonance light scattering technique based on silver nanoparticles.

We have developed a green approach to prepare DNA-templated silver nanoparticles (Ag-NPs) from the direct reaction between Ag+ and ascorbic acid in the presence of DNA and sodium hydroxide. The Ag-NPs showed strong resonance light scattering (RLS) intensity property. Then, the interaction between hydrogen sulfide (H2 S) and Ag-NPs was studied by measuring their RLS spectra. The results showed that there is a strong interaction between Ag-NPs and H2 S, which resulted in a decrease in the size of Ag-NPs and a decrease in the RLS intensity of the Ag-NPs solution at the wavelength of 467 nm. The results demonstrated that the RLS technique offers a sensitive and simple tool for investigating the interaction between Ag-NPs and H2 S, which can be applied to detect H2 S with high sensitivity and selectivity without complex readout equipment. The linear range for H2 S determination was found to be the range from 5.0 × 10-9 to 1.0 × 10-7  mol L-1 , and the detection limit (3σ/k) was 2.8 × 10-9  mol L-1 . Moreover, the proposed method was applied for the determination of H2 S in natural water samples with satisfactory results. Graphical abstract The application of Ag-NPs in H2 S detection.