Fabrication of a near-infrared excitation surface molecular imprinting ratiometric fluorescent probe for sensitive and rapid detecting perfluorooctane sulfonate in complex matrix

Highlights: • A NIR excitation surface imprinting ratiometric fluorescent probe was fabricated. • The probe exhibited excellent sensitivity and selectivity for trace PFOS detection. • The LOD of this probe for PFOS was low to 1 pmol/L in aqueous solution. • The probe has well detection performance in wide pH range. • The probe has been successfully used to PFOS detection in biological samples. Construction of fluorescent probe for highly sensitive and selective detection of perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS) in water and biological samples is a very important strategy in related pollutant monitoring and environmental health risk appraisal. To overcome the drawback of low sensitivity caused by high-back ground signal of the conventional sensor, a molecularly imprinted near-infrared excitation ratiometric fluorescent probe was constructed and employed to determine PFOS. The sensing process was achieved through the selectively recognition of specific cavities in the probe surface with analyte, accompanied by fluorescence quenching due to the photoinduced electron transfer effect between upconversion materials and PFOS. Under optimized experimental conditions, the fluorescence quenching efficiency of the probe has good linearity against the concentrations of PFOS response divided into two segments within linear ranges of 0.001–0.1 nmol/L and 0.1–1 nmol/L, respectively, with low detection limit of 1 pmol/L. Selective experiment results indicate that the C-F chain length plays a dominant role in molecular recognition and high sensitively detection. The fabricated probe shows well detection performance in a wide pH range. Furthermore, real samples analyses indicate that such an efficient fluorescent probe has potentials in PFOS determination in surface water, human serum and egg extract sample analyses.