Advancing Glucose Sensing Through Auto‐Fluorescent Polymer Brushes: From Surface Design to Nano‐Arrays

Abstract

Designing smart (bio)interfaces with the capability to sense and react to changes in local environments offers intriguing possibilities for new surface‐based sensing devices and technologies. Polymer brushes make ideal materials to design such adaptive and responsive interfaces given their large variety of functional and structural possibilities as well as their outstanding abilities to respond to physical, chemical, and biological stimuli. Herein, a practical sensory interface for glucose detection based on auto‐fluorescent polymer brushes decorated with phenylboronic acid (PBA) receptors is presented. The glucose‐responsive luminescent surfaces, which are capable of translating conformational transitions triggered by pH variations and binding events into fluorescent readouts without the need for fluorescent dyes, are grown from both nanopatterned and non‐patterned substrates. Two‐photon laser scanning confocal microscopy and atomic force microscopy (AFM) analyses reveal the relationship between the brush conformation and glucose concentration and confirm that the phenylboronic acid functionalized brushes can bind glucose over a range of physiologically relevant concentrations in a reversible manner. The combination of auto‐fluorescent polymer brushes with synthetic receptors presents a promising avenue for designing innovative and robust sensing systems, which are essential for various biomedical applications, among other uses.

pH-Responsive, Wide Color Gamut Dynamic Color Display Enabled by PDMAEMA Brush-Based Fabry–Perot Resonant Cavity

“…This point could be verified through putting the MIM FP cavity into the electrolytic cell to real-time monitor pH distribution during water splitting reaction (Movie S1, Supporting Information). It is worth mentioning that the response rate of the MIM FP cavity, when compared to other stimuli-responsive material based on bulk polymers reported before, ,,− is dramatically enhanced owing to the integration of the responsive polymer brushes, which possesses more flexible chain movement and faster conformational change without the limitation of cross-linked networks. ,− To further highlight the advantages of the PDMAEMA brushes, we compare the responsive performance of our PDMAEMA brushes-based MIM FP cavity and other hydrogel-based MIM structures reported in state-of-the-art literature, as listed in the Table . It is clear that the PDMAEMA brushes-based MIM cavity exhibits a much faster response rate than the hydrogel-based MIM cavities in the previously reported literature.…”