Construction of lanthanide-containing ratiometric probe for facile anthrax biomarker detection

Since the outbreak of anthrax attack in the United States in 2001, much effort has been done to detect anthrax spores. In this paper, a simple and facile lanthanide-containing ratiometric luminescence “turn on” probe is constructed to achieve sensitive and selective detection of anthrax spores biomarker — pyridine-2,6-carboxylic acid (DPA) by simply mixing Tb 3+ , sodium polyacrylate as well as red internal reference which could exclude some disturbance from the luminescence of biological tissue. Our probe shows remarkable luminescence enhancement upon addition of DPA. The detection limit for DPA is measured as 35.8 nM with a wide work range of 0–66.7 μM. Besides, our probe enables distinguish DPA selectively from numerous interfering materials in aqueous solution. Further test strip experiments demonstrate the potential practical application of our probe in DPA detection.