Fluorescent point-of-care (POC) sensors
have found great utility
in fields like clinical diagnosis, food testing, and environmental
monitoring. Herein, we developed a highly stable POC sensor that enabled
the visual detection of tetracycline (TC) in a distinct fluorescent-traffic-light
manner. In the sensor, a composite material of copper nanoclusters
and metal–organic framework (CuNCs@MOF-5) prepared with a facile
one-pot synthetic strategy was employed as the core element for target
recognition and signal transduction. As evidenced by experiments,
the as-prepared CuNCs@MOF-5 exhibited significantly improved fluorescence
properties in terms of emission enhancement (about 28-fold) and stability
improvement (over 110 days) compared to the CuNCs without confining
and protection by MOF-5. More importantly, it was found that TC could
uniquely interact with Zn(II) to trigger the disassembly of CuNCs@MOF-5,
resulting in green fluorescence emission from the TC–Zn(II)
complex and red fluorescence weakening of CuNCs. On the basis of this
finding, a simple and stable sensor was proposed for POC detection
of TC, which demonstrated high sensitivity, selectivity, and reproducibility.
In addition to homogeneous visual detection in a 96-well plate, a
CuNCs@MOF-5-contained agarose gel array was easily fabricated to achieve
direct detection of TC in milk without any pretreatment, thanks to
the size-sieving effect of the gel. Moreover, a test paper array was
also put forward for low-cost TC detection, which indicates the extensibility
and practicability of this sensing strategy.