Abstract
A highly sensitive and selective fluorescent probe for fluoride ions has been developed by incorporating the dimethylphosphinothionyl group as a recognition moiety into the fluorophore of coumarin. The detection mechanism is based on the fluoride ion-triggered cleavage of the dimethylphosphinothionyl group, followed by the release of coumarin, which leads to a large fluorescence enhancement at 455 nm (λex = 385 nm). Under the optimized conditions, the fluorescence enhancement of the probe is directly proportional to the concentration of fluoride ions in the range of 0–30 μM with a detection limit of 0.29 μM, which is much lower than the maximum content of fluoride ions guided by WHO. Notably, satisfying results have been obtained by utilizing the probe to determine fluoride ions in real-water samples and commercially available toothpaste samples. The proposed probe is rather simple and may be useful in the detection of fluoride ions in more real samples.
Highlights
Fluoride ions (FÀ), as the smallest anion with the highest electronegativity, play a major role in health and environmental science
A highly sensitive and selective fluorescent probe for fluoride ions has been developed by incorporating the dimethylphosphinothionyl group as a recognition moiety into the fluorophore of coumarin
The detection mechanism is based on the fluoride ion-triggered cleavage of the dimethylphosphinothionyl group, followed by the release of coumarin, which leads to a large fluorescence enhancement at 455 nm
Summary
Fluoride ions (FÀ), as the smallest anion with the highest electronegativity, play a major role in health and environmental science. Among the present analytical methods for FÀ, uorescent probes have caught great attention due to their high sensitivity and selectivity as well as easy operation.[11,12,13,14,15] To date, uorescent probes based on various sensing mechanisms have been reported for the detection of FÀ, including the uoride–hydrogen bonding interaction,[16,17] boron– uoride complexion[18,19] and uoride induced chemical reaction.[20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29,30,31,32] Among them the rst two types of probes could only work in non-aqueous media or media with high percentage of organic solvent because the detection signal would be largely hindered in aqueous environment.[23,24] So the third strategy, that is uoride induced chemical reaction, has attracted much attention. Uorescent probes employing such a recognition unit are still rare.[23,31] we report probe 1 as a sensitive and selective uorescence off–on probe for FÀ
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