MOFs⊃Dyes/Nanoparticles Hybrid Fluorometric Sensors for Emerging Contaminants: A Decade of Progress, Challenges and Opportunities

Abstract

The uncontrolled use of antibiotics in healthcare, agriculture, and livestock production and their direct release into the environment may lead to antimicrobial resistance (AMR), posing a serious global health risk. In this perspective, the development of a selective and sensitive detection strategy is a prime interest. Over the past few decades, reticular metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have emerged as promising optical sensor materials due to several standout advantages, including porous structures, large surface areas, high thermal and chemical stability, structural tunability, and unique photophysical properties. However, weak intrinsic luminescence and signal transduction efficiency restrict sensing performances of the pristine MOFs, necessitating the incorporation of luminescent dyes or nanoparticles (NPs) into MOFs scaffold. The present review systematically provides a comprehensive overview of MOFs⊃Dyes/Nanoparticles (NPs)-based hybrid materials developed over the last decade (2016-2026) for fluorometric sensing, with a primary focus on antibiotic detection. Additionally, parallel advances in sensing other environmental and biological stimuli have been discussed to contextualize the versatility and broader applicability of these hybrid systems. The key synthetic approaches, along with the rationale of designing the hybrid system, have also been briefly outlined. In addition, the in-depth sensing mechanisms and detailed analytical performance of the sensors have been critically analyzed in light of the structure-property-performance synergy. Ultimately, the gaps in present research strategy, along with artificial intelligence-machine learning (AI-ML)-guided future research direction, particularly emphasizing smartphone-assisted digitized data analysis, are presented to draw a comprehensive guideline for next-generation researchers towards designing MOFs-based hybrid materials with enhanced analytical performances, contributing to improved global and environmental health monitoring.