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 and π-π stacking 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, F₄₇₀, F₆₆₈, F₆₆₈/F₄₇₀ of SPs are chosen as three sensor components to constitute our sensor array. With the addition 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 readily capture Cu²⁺ to switch the fluorescence of CDs/TCPP initially altered by Cu²⁺. Hence, CDs/TCPP-Cu²⁺ 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.