Dual-emission samarium macrocycle as a lab-on-a-molecule enables high-throughput discrimination of anionic sulfonate surfactants

Abstract Nowadays, it is still a huge challenge to efficiently discriminate of analogous anionic sulfonate surfactants, which are noxious xenobiotics related to many safety concerns of environment and life. Recently, great advances in orthogonal detection have shown the great advantages of principal component analysis (PCA) to construct a comprehensive statistical method for sensing signals in recognizing more analytes with similar structures. Inspired by sensor arrays, we propose a new ‘one-element-two-channel’ protocol upon a dual-emission samarium macrocycle Sm-2o as the lab-on-a-molecule, containing two isolated emissions of macrocycle (443 nm) and Sm(III) (643 nm) emitters as two fluorescence channels. Herein, these targeted surfactants instruct original fluorescences of Sm-2o to generate diverse sensing signals which can finally convert into unique fingerprint patterns and distinguish four anionic surfactants (SDS, SDSO, SCI and AOS) from other ten ones, even their proportional concentrations. Significantly, this high-throughput discrimination is realized by different receptor-analyte interactions and the structure transformation of Sm-2o in diverse microenvironments formed in various types of surfactants. Furthermore, these sensing systems also show satisfactory discrimination and semiquantitation performances for mixtures of anionic surfactants, especially the SDS and SDBS, in real water sample, revealing the practicability of our lab-on-a-molecule probe. On the basis of the PCA method, this work provides a vital reference for the design and application of multianalyte chemosensors.