Colorimetric detection of melamine based on p-chlorobenzenesulfonic acid-modified AuNPs

A highly selective and sensitive method is developed for colorimetric detection of melamine using gold nanoparticles (AuNPs) functionalized with p-chlorobenzenesulfonic acid. The addition of melamine induced the aggregation of AuNPs, as evidenced from the morphological characterizations and the color changed from red wine to blue, which could also be monitored by the UV–visible spectrometer and even naked eyes. This process caused a significant increase in the absorbance ratio (A650nm/A520nm) of p-chlorobenzenesulfonic acid–AuNPs. Under optimized conditions, the system exhibited a linear response to melamine in the range of 6.0 × 10−7–1.5 × 10−6 mol L−1 with a correlation coefficient of 0.997, and the limit of detection can even be 2.3 nM, which was much lower than some other methods and the safe limits (20 μM in both the USA and EU, 8.0 μM for infant formula in China, 1.2 μM in the CAC (Codex Alimentarius Commission) review for melamine in liquid infant formula). More importantly, the developed method presented excellent tolerance to coexisting common metal ions such as Ca2+, Zn2+, whose concentration is 1000 times of melamine, so that it had been applied to the analysis of melamine in liquid milk and milk powder with the recovery of 97.0–101 % and 100–103 %, respectively, indicating that the proposed method is quite a highly effective means to determine melamine in milk products.