We
herein report an organic field-effect transistor (OFET) based
chemical sensor for multi-oxyanion detection with pattern recognition
techniques. The oxyanions ubiquitously play versatile roles in biological
systems, and accessing the chemical information they provide would
potentially facilitate fundamental research in diagnosis and pharmacology.
In this regard, phosphates in human blood serum would be a promising
indicator for early case detection of significant diseases. Thus,
the development of an easy-to-use chemical sensor for qualitative
and quantitative detection of oxyanions is required in real-world
scenarios. To this end, an extended-gate-type OFET has been functionalized
with a metal complex consisting of 2,2′-dipicolylamine and
a copper(II) ion (CuII-dpa), allowing a compact chemical
sensor for oxyanion detection. The OFET combined with a uniform CuII-dpa-based self-assembled monolayer (SAM) on the extended-gate
gold electrode shows a cross-reactive response, which suggests a discriminatory
power for pattern recognition. Indeed, the qualitative detection of
13 oxyanions (i.e., hydrogen monophosphate, pyrophosphate, adenosine
monophosphate, adenosine diphosphate, adenosine triphosphate, terephthalate,
phthalate, isophthalate, malonate, oxalate, lactate, benzoate, and
acetate) has been demonstrated by only using a single OFET-based sensor
with linear discriminant analysis, which has shown 100% correct classification.
The OFET has been further applied to the quantification of hydrogen
monophosphate in human blood serum using a support vector machine
(SVM). The multiple predictions of hydrogen monophosphate at 49 and
89 μM have been successfully realized with low errors, which
indicates that the OFET-based sensor with pattern recognition techniques
would be a practical sensing platform for medical assays. We believe
that a combination of the OFET functionalized with the SAM-based recognition
scaffold and powerful pattern recognition methods can achieve multi-analyte
detection from just a single sensor.