ORGANIC
LETTERS
2006
Vol. 8, No. 15
3239-3242
A Simple and General Strategy for the
Design of Fluorescent Cation Sensor
Beads¶
Suvadeep Nath and Uday Maitra*
Department of Organic Chemistry, Indian Institute of Science,
Bangalore 560 012, India, and the Chemical Biology Unit,
Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for AdVanced Scientific Research, Bangalore, India
Received May 3, 2006
ABSTRACT
Chenodeoxycholic acid based PET sensors for alkali metal ions have been immobilized on Merrifield resin and on Tentagel. The fluorescence
of the sensor beads is enhanced upon binding the cations. The modular nature of the sensor allows designing different sensors based on this
concept.
Photoinduced electron transfer (PET) based cation sensors
in solutions have been explored extensively in the recent
past.1,2 Such a molecular device attached to a polymer bead
and capable of sensing cations can have practical application
for qualitative detection and quantitative determination of
metal ions. Not surprisingly, the development of polymer-
bead-attached sensors as reusable cation sensors is of
contemporary interest.3
We recently reported a bile acid-derived sensor (1) in
which through space photoinduced electron transfer (PET)
¶ Dedicated to Prof. Ronald Breslow on the occasion of his 75th birthday.
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10.1021/ol061082k CCC: $33.50
© 2006 American Chemical Society
Published on Web 06/27/2006