Hybrid supraparticles of carbon dots/porphyrin for multifunctional tongue-mimic sensors

Supraparticles(SPs),such as assembly of inorganic components with organic,have made tremendous attention in biochemical analysis,which represents a novel but challenging research orientation.Herein,a single-SPs multifunctional fluorescent sensor array has been developed for high-throughput detection of heavy metal ions in biofluids,which is based on an inorganic/organic hybrid SPs consisting of carbon dots(CDs)and an easily available porphyrin[5,10,15,20-tetra(4-carboxyphenyl)porphyrin(TCPP)].TCPP can aggregate with the CDs to form the assembly(CDs/TCPP SPs)through the electrostatic andπ-πstacking interaction.There are two independent and clearly separated fluorescence emission peaks at 470 and 668 nm in the resultant CDs/TCPP SPs under 380 nm excitation.As a proof-of concept design,F 470,F 668,F 668/F 470 of SPs are chosen as three sensor components to constitute our sensor array.With the addi-tion of metal ions,three sensor components can generate different fluorescence response patterns for discriminating 11 heavy metal ions via principal component analysis(PCA).Additionally,thiols can read-ily capture Cu^(2+)to switch the fluorescence of CDs/TCPP initially altered by Cu^(2+).Hence,CDs/TCPP-Cu^(2+)ensemble is further demonstrated to be a powerful sensor array for pattern recognition of 7 thiols and even chiral recognition of cysteine enantiomers.This novel strategy avoids the tanglesome synthesis of multiple sensing probes and dedicates an innovative method for the facile establishment of tongue-mimic sensors,which would prospectively sprout more homologous assumptions to broaden its application toward more biosensing fields.