Europium-macrocycle based lab-on-a-molecule fluorescent probe and its multianalyte detection of phosphate and aluminum ions

Despite the tremendous advances that have been made in selective detection of a wide range of inorganic anions and cations, a single fluorescent probe possessing a high discrimination ability for these ions and their analogues is still very rare. Herein we propose a mononuclear europium-macrocycle complex Eu - 2 l which employs the imine bond interaction sites and embeds europium ion into a Schiff-base macrocyclic cavity interior to construct the dual-emission matrix for the lab-on-a-molecule fluorescent probe . Eu - 2 l not only allows the conventional spectral analysis for significant intensity changes of emission bands but also enables the statistical analysis for different levels of fluorescence sensing signals. As a result, this novel fluorescent platform Eu - 2 l shows the great real-time, selective, sensitive and quantitative detection ability for PO 4 3- or Al 3+ among common inorganic ions . Furthermore, when sensing signals of anions and cations on different fluorescence channels are systematically evaluated by principal component analysis (PCA) and hierarchical cluster analysis (HCA) methods, Eu - 2 l allows the high-through discrimination of not only 18 anions and 12 cations but also several analogues and their proportional mixtures, even in real environmental water sample. This work enriches the PO 4 3- and Al 3+ chemosensors , highlights huge benefits of the combination multi-emission fluorescent matrix and statistical analysis methods and thus provides a vital reference to construct the lab-on-a-molecule probe by a single chemical entity for multianalyte detection and discrimination in various fields.