Catch Them All! a Color Catcher Protocol for Colorimetric Sensors Based on Charged and Neutral Porphyrinoids

Abstract

Color Catcher® (CC) is widely used to prevent the release of color while washing clothes at a rather high temperature in the washing machine, but it has recently been demonstrated to be an interesting cheap support for the development of optodes. CC is a cellulose-based material with a polymer having positively charged groups (cationic polymer)or hosting small molecules positively charged, which act as traps for negatively charged tissue dyes. For this reason, CC is an excellent solid support for selected negatively charged dyes.We have recently developed fluorometric and colorimetric optodes grafting both anionic and neutral porphyrinoids onto CC strips. They have been applied to assess both inorganic and organic pollutants in natural waters for ecological monitoring purposes.The exploitation of CC as the solid support of functionalized strips, coupled with LED as light source and webcam as detector, allows the development of an effective, easy-to-use, and low-cost system for the detection of different analytes in an aqueous solution. These devices could represent an interesting approach for in situ analysis of water quality control.