Workshop

Phosphates are an essential nutrient that is necessary for many industrial, biological, and agricultural processes. With overabundance of phosphates in environments, it can cause significant damage to environments. In complex aqueous solutions, it remains a significant challenge to detect phosphates in a rapid and cost-effective manner in environmental samples. Chemiresistive sensors and electrolyte gated organic field effect transistors serve to rapidly test complex environmental samples for phosphate quantification in addition to the lower cost. By using diketopyrrole-pyrrole derivatives and the penta-t-butlypentacyanopentabenzo[25]annulene “cyanostar” macrocycle can sense the phosphates in the matrix will decrease in resistance upon analyte binding. The sensing studies carried out show the sensor being able to detect phosphates as low as 1 ppb or 8.4 nM in the complex sea water solution with limit of quantification not far off being 1.03 ppb or 8.65 nM. This sensor provides new opportunities to deploy more robust and cheaper sensors to monitor the environment and for biological samples.