Smart lanthanide coordination polymer fluorescence probe for mercury(II) determination

Abstract Lanthanide coordination polymers (LCPs) have recently emerged as attractive biosensor materials due to their flexible components, high tailorable properties and unique luminescence features. In this work, we designed a smart LCP probe of Tb-CIP/AMP {(CIP, ciprofloxacin) (AMP, adenosine monophosphate)} for Hg 2+ detection by using lanthanide ions as metal nodes, CIP as ligand molecule, and AMP as bridging linker and recognition unit. Tb-CIP/AMP emits strong green luminescence due to the inclusion of AMP, which withdraws the coordinated water molecules and shields Tb 3+ from the quenching effect of O–H vibration in water molecules. The subsequent addition of Hg 2+ into Tb-CIP/AMP can strongly quench the fluorescence because of the specific coordination interaction between AMP and Hg 2+ . As a kind of Hg 2+ nanosensor, the probe exhibited excellent selectivity for Hg 2+ and high sensitivity with detection limit of 0.16 nM. In addition, the probe has long fluorescence lifetime up to millisecond and has been applied to detect Hg 2+ in drinking water and human urine samples with satisfactory results. We envision that our strategy, in the future, could be extended to the designation of other LCP-based hypersensitive time-gated luminescence assays in biological media and biomedical imaging.