Supramolecular Interface for Biochemical Sensing Applications

Abstract

Biochemical sensing represents one of crucial technologies that will have dramatic influence on our society, which has been widely used in environmental monitoring, industrial quality control, and point-of-care diagnostics. Accordingly, the demand of reliable sensors for the rapid, sensitive, and specific detection of various analytes both in vapor and liquid phase is quite urgent. This requires a successful integration of sensitive materials and transduction devices. Inspired by the wisdom of biological system in nature, chemists developed a supramolecular system that mimics the exquisite specific behavior of biological receptors, exploiting the concepts of shape recognition and binding site complementarity. In recent years, many groups have approached biochemical sensing with these macrocycles, mainly using crown ether, cyclodextrins, calixarenes, pillararenes, cavitands, cryptophanes, etc. All these classes of compounds share the presence of an enforced cavity of molecular dimensions which acts as molecular recognition site for the incoming analytes. The majority of supramolecular-based sensors contain a macrocycles sensitive layer tunable for the detection of different analytes and a transducer which can transform these biochemical interactions into a readable signal (Fig. 1).