Rapid Discovery and Structure-Property Relationships of Metal-Ion Fluorescent Sensors via Macroarray Synthesis

A macroarray immobilisation of fluorophores on filter papers for sensing metal ions by in-situ reductive amination and carbodiimide coupling is reported herein. Chemometric approaches resulted in a rapid discovery of sensors that can synergistically discriminate up to 12 metal ions with great prediction accuracies. Covalently bound on paper, sensoring scaffolds that were synthesised from the macroarray format can readily be adopted as practical paper-based sensors with great reusability and sensitivity, achieving the limit of detection at low nanomolar level with some repeating spotting. Lastly, the discovered scaffolds were also confirmed to be functional as unbound molecules, thus paving the way for more diverse applications.