A team of researchers led by academics at Rutgers University has developed tiny, glowing crystals that are able to detect and then bind heavy-metal toxins in drinking water such as lead and mercury.

The discovery, which was detailed in a paperpublished by the journal Applied Materials and Interfaces, may wind up being the latest powerful tool that can be used to find and then clean up contaminated water sources like drinking water in Flint, Michigan, and Newark, New Jersey, Nature World Newsreported.

Known as luminescent metal-organic frameworks (LMOFs), the crystals work like small, reusable sensors and traps for heavy-metal toxins that contaminate drinking water supplies. Researchers also said that there are no other MOFs that have the same dual role of both finding and then capturing toxic heavy metals.

"Others had developed MOFs for either the detection of heavy metals or for their removal, but nobody before had really investigated one that does both," Jing Li, a Rutgers chemistry professor and lead author of the study, said in a press release.

'99 percent effective'

The team found that one type of LMOF can be selective in identifying and absorbing more than 99 percent of mercury from a test mixture of both heavy and light metals over 30 minutes. Using an X-ray device at Berkeley Lab's Advanced Light Source (ALS) and software tools, the research team could map a three-dimensional structure of the crystal with an atomic resolution. Simon Teat, a Berkeley Lab scientist, led this particular aspect of the study, the press release said.

The research team also discovered that the crystals contain hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen and zinc atoms that line large, open channels. In the case of this study, the openings in the LMOFs' framework permitted heavy metals to pass into the channels and then bind chemically to the MOFs.