This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Division of Materials Sciences and Engineering under Award No. DE-FG-02-01ER45935. R.R. acknowledges a postdoctoral fellowship from the Spanish Ministerio de Innovación y Ciencia and Fundación Española para la Ciencia y la Tecnología. E.M. acknowledges the Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia for a Ramon y Cajal contract. The microelectrodes were fabricated at MC2 Nanofabrication Laboratory of Chalmers University; their fabrication was financed by the FP6 Research Infrastructures program MC2ACCESS (026029). Hunter College infrastructure is supported by the National Institutes of Health, the RCMI program (G12-RR003037-245476).

An ultralow concentration of Pb ions is detected by a sensor integrating a peptide nanotube detection platform with a smart peptide function that specifically metalizes the target ion. As the PbII-binding peptide on the nanotube, which bridges two electrodes, templates Pb nanowires, a resistor appears in the circuit, and conductance is detected as the signal for PbII.

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