Amino group dependent sensing properties of metal-organic frameworks: selective turn-on fluorescence detection of lysine and arginine

• Published in: RSC advances Vol. 1; no. 61; pp. 37449 - 37455
• Main Authors: Dong, Jing, Zhang, Xiu-Du, Xie, Xia-Fei, Guo, Fan, Sun, Wei-Yin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Royal Society of Chemistry 09.10.2020; The Royal Society of Chemistry
• Subjects: Amino acids; Aqueous solutions; Chemistry; Emission spectra; Fluorescence; Functional groups; Hydrogen bonding; Lysine; Metal-organic frameworks; NMR; Nuclear magnetic resonance; Photoluminescence; Porosity; Properties (attributes); Sensitivity; Zirconium
• ISSN: 2046-2069; 2046-2069
• DOI: 10.1039/d0ra06879a

Recently, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been extensively investigated as fluorescence chemsensors due to their tunable porosity, framework structure and photoluminescence properties. In this paper, a well-known Zr( iv )-based MOF, UiO-66-NH 2 was demonstrated to have capability for detection of l -lysine (Lys) and l -arginine (Arg) selectively from common essential amino acids in aqueous media via a fluorescence turn-on mechanism. Further investigation reveals its high sensitivity and strong anti-interference properties. Moreover, the possible mechanism for sensing Lys and Arg was explored by FT-IR and 1 H-NMR, and the results indicate that the enhancement of the fluorescence could be ascribed to the adsorption of Lys/Arg and the hydrogen bonding interactions between Lys/Arg and the amino group of UiO-66-NH 2 . The difference of the sensing capacity and sensitivity between UiO-66 and UiO-66-NH 2 revealed that the amino group plays an essential role in the sensing performance. This work presents a unique example of the functional group dependent sensing properties of MOFs. The amino group of UiO-66-NH 2 was demonstrated to play an important role in selective fluorescence turn-on sensing of lysine and arginine.