Surfactant Aggregates Encapsulating and Modulating: An Effective Way to Generate Selective and Discriminative Fluorescent Sensors

Abstract

The heterogeneous structure and dynamic balancing nature of surfactant aggregates make them attractive in developing fluorescent sensors. They can provide a number of advantages, e.g., enhanced fluorescence stability and quantum yield, detection capability in aqueous solutions, and easy operation. Thus, various strategies have been used to construct surfactant aggregate-based fluorescent sensors. Surfactant aggregates play various roles in different strategies and realize multiple sensing behaviors. Many new functions have been discovered for surfactant aggregates in constructing fluorescent sensors. In this feature article, we briefly summarize the development of surfactant aggregate-based fluorescent sensors and their applications in three different types of sensing: selective sensing, multiple analyte sensing, and cross-reactive sensing. For each type of sensing, the design strategies and the roles of surfactant aggregates are particularly introduced. An understanding of these aspects will help to expand the applications of surfactant assemblies in the sensing field.

Nanostructured Luminescent Micelles: Efficient “Functional Materials” for Sensing Nitroaromatic and Nitramine Explosives

“…As mentioned above, a similar π−π staking within ATP and dye molecule triggered an effective energy transfer (ET) from the dye to ATP that resulted in significant quenching of emission intensity. A more detailed account on luminescent micellar sensors for sensing bioanalytes can be found in reference [4,5].…”

“…In the last decades, significant advancement has been made to construct the luminescent micellar systems for sensing target analytes, ion transport, and bioimaging. These luminophoric materials are used to demonstrate the rudimentary models for various CT/ET processes in an aqueous solution in the presence of various chemical entities [1][2][3][4][5][6][7]. Based on the fundamental idea of CT/ET transition, a considerable number of elegant luminous micellar systems are developed for sensing metal ions [8][9][10][11][12] and anions [13][14][15], biomolecules [16][17][18][19][20], detection of explosive [21][22][23][24][25], etc.…”

Array-Based Discriminative Optical Biosensors for Identifying Multiple Proteins in Aqueous Solution and Biofluids

“…As we all know, amphiphilic molecules, such as surfactants, dendrimers, and block copolymers can form dynamic supramolecular aggregates, such as micelles and vesicles in aqueous solutions (Yan et al, 2010 , 2012 ). The strategy of amphiphilic aggregates encapsulating and modulating fluorophores has been widely applied in construction of fluorescent sensors or arrays for proteins because they can provide several advantages: (1) The hydrophobic domains can non-covalently encapsulate guest probes to improve their solubility, fluorescence stability and quantum yield (Hu et al, 2010 ; Geng et al, 2014 ; Fan et al, 2019 ). (2) The subtle variation of amphiphilic molecule aggregation states can modulate the photophysical properties and fluorescence emission of encapsulated probe (Ding et al, 2013 ; Cao et al, 2014a ; Cao J. et al, 2014 ).…”

Recent advances in applications of surfactant‐based voltammetric sensors

“…Organic amphiphilic compounds consisting of a hydrophobic head and a tail are referred to as a surfactant. The polar heads of surfactants can be non‐ionic and ionic, and subsequent classes can be divided into cationic, anionic, and zwitterionic (Fan et al, 2018). Non‐ionic surfactants, usually composed of a polar region, have no charge in the aqueous medium.…”

“…The most important criteria for evaluating sensor performance are its sensitivity, selectivity, and stability. Generally, techniques such as spectrophotometry, colorimetric assay (Dey & Bhattacharya, 2016; Javidi et al, 2018; Khavani et al, 2019), or fluorescence spectrometry (Fan et al, 2018; Verdian‐Doghaei et al, 2014) are employed to design sensors. However, they may require extensive sample preparation and have difficulty detecting small levels of analytes due to matrix interference and insufficient sensitivity.…”