Metathesis in Metal-Organic Gels (MOGs): A Facile Strategy to Construct Robust Fluorescent Ln-MOG Sensor for Antibiotics and Explosives

Zheng-Sheng Qin, Wen-Wen Dong, Jun Zhao, Ya-Pan Wu, Zheng-Fang Tian, Qichun Zhang, Dong-Sheng Li

Abstract: It is essential to develop novel effective sensor materials for detection of antibiotics and organic explosives due to their negative impacts on ecosystem and human health. In this work, guided by in situ metal node metathesis approach, a fluorescent metal-organic gel (MOG(Eu) gel) has firstly been synthesized by metal ion exchange between Eu3+ and Al3+ in the non-fluorescent MOG(Al) gel. More importantly, the post-synthetic MOG(Eu) xerogel shows remarkable selective detection ability towards ronidazole (RDZ), ornidazole (ODZ), metronidazole (MDZ), and dimetridazole (DTZ) antibiotics as well as 4-nitrophenol (4-NP) with low detection limits of 1.205, 0.542, 0.999, 0.377, and 1.582 ppm, respectively. The high quenching efficiencies can be attributed to the decrease of effective energy transfer in the host-guest systems. It is believed that the strategy of metathesis would open up new opportunities for synthesis methods and functional applications in MOGs materials.