Lanthanide MOFs detect solvents

Abstract

With the help of a little light, a metal-organic framework (MOF) containing photoluminescent lanthanides can uniquely identify and measure the concentrations of multiple solvents, a research team reports (Chem 2017, DOI: j.chempr.2017.02.010). Applied to a dipstick, the material could enable rapid identification of environmental contaminants on-site rather than require responders to send samples to a lab. The approach could also solve the tricky analytical problem of determining how much H2O contaminates D2O, an issue for isotopic labeling in biomolecular experiments and calibration for spectroscopic methods such as nuclear magnetic resonance. Led by University of Texas, Austin, chemistry professor Simon M. Humphrey, the team investigated a MOF composed of tris(p-carboxylato)triphenylphosphine and europium(III), gadolinium(III), and terbium(III). Each lanthanide has a unique emission spectrum: EuIII emits red, GdIII emits ultraviolet, and TbIII emits green light. But when solvent molecules bind within the...