AIE‐doped Poly(Ionic Liquid) Photonic Spheres for the Discrimination of Psychoactive Substances

• Published in: Chemistry : a European journal 2023-04, Vol.29 (19), p.e202203616-n/a
• Main Authors: Liu, Chengcheng, Li, Wenyun, Zhang, Wanlin, Zhao, Hongwei, He, Guokang, Li, Chi, Wang, Chen, Li, Guangtao
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: aggregation-induced emission; Chemistry; Drug abuse; Drug discrimination; Fluorescent Dyes - chemistry; Ionic Liquids; Nanoparticles - chemistry; photonic crystal; Photonic crystals; poly(ionic liquid); psychoactive substance; Public health; sensor array; Target detection
• ISSN: 0947-6539; 1521-3765
• DOI: 10.1002/chem.202203616

Drugs of abuse has drawn intense attention due to increasing concerns to public health and safety. The construction of a sensing platform with the capability to identify them remains a big challenge because of the limitations of synthetic complexity, sensing scope and receptor extendibility. Here a kind of poly(ionic liquid) (PIL) photonic crystal spheres doped with aggregation‐induced emission (AIE) luminogens was developed. As diverse noncovalent interactions involve in PIL moieties, the single sphere shows different binding affinity to a broad range of psychoactive substances. Furthermore, the dual‐channel signals arising from photonic crystal structures and sensitive AIE‐luminogens provide high‐dimensional information for discriminative detection of targets, even for molecules with slight structural differences. More importantly, such single sphere sensing platform could be flexibly customized through ion‐exchange, showing great extendibility to fabricate high‐efficiency/high‐throughput sensing arrays without tedious synthesis. The high‐degree flexibility and extendibility of introducing various functional anions into the poly(ionic liquid)‐based single sphere sensing platform undoubtedly enable to obtain a huge number of sensing spheres with different properties, together with dual‐channel response mechanism, it shows great potential for high‐efficiency/high‐throughput identification of complicated multi‐analytes.