Issue 4, 2023

Detection and differentiation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water using a fluorescent imprint-and-report sensor array

Abstract

Widespread industrial use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) as surfactants has led to global contamination of water sources with these persistent, highly stable chemicals. As a result, humans and wildlife are regularly exposed to PFAS, which have been shown to bioaccumulate and cause adverse health effects. Methods for detecting PFAS in water are currently limited and primarily utilize mass spectrometry (MS), which is time-consuming and requires expensive instrumentation. Thus, new methods are needed to rapidly and reliably assess the pollution level of water sources. While some fluorescent PFAS sensors exist, they typically function in high nanomolar or micromolar concentration ranges and focus on sensing only 1–2 individual PFAS. Our work aims to address this problem by developing a fluorescent sensor for both individual PFAS, as well as complex PFAS mixtures, and demonstrate its functionality in tap water samples. Here we show that dynamic combinatorial libraries (DCLs) with simple building blocks can be templated with a fluorophore and subsequently used as sensors to form an array that differentially detects each PFAS species and various mixtures thereof. Our method is a high-throughput analysis technique that allows many samples to be analyzed simultaneously with a plate reader. This is one of the first examples of a fluorescent PFAS sensor array that functions at low nanomolar concentrations, and herein we report its use for the rapid detection of PFAS contamination in water.

Graphical abstract: Detection and differentiation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water using a fluorescent imprint-and-report sensor array

Supplementary files

Article information

Article type
Edge Article
Submitted
12 Okt. 2022
Accepted
21 Dec. 2022
First published
29 Dec. 2022
This article is Open Access

All publication charges for this article have been paid for by the Royal Society of Chemistry
Creative Commons BY-NC license

Chem. Sci., 2023,14, 928-936

Detection and differentiation of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in water using a fluorescent imprint-and-report sensor array

E. E. Harrison and M. L. Waters, Chem. Sci., 2023, 14, 928 DOI: 10.1039/D2SC05685B

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported Licence. You can use material from this article in other publications, without requesting further permission from the RSC, provided that the correct acknowledgement is given and it is not used for commercial purposes.

To request permission to reproduce material from this article in a commercial publication, please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

If you are an author contributing to an RSC publication, you do not need to request permission provided correct acknowledgement is given.

If you are the author of this article, you do not need to request permission to reproduce figures and diagrams provided correct acknowledgement is given. If you want to reproduce the whole article in a third-party commercial publication (excluding your thesis/dissertation for which permission is not required) please go to the Copyright Clearance Center request page.

Read more about how to correctly acknowledge RSC content.

Social activity

Spotlight

Advertisements