Sponsor: National Nature Science Foundation of China (NNSFC)
Headed by Shen Jiangshan
Date: 2011.01-2013.12

Arsenic (As) widely exists in the environment as a strong cancerogenic element.  It is important that, for theoretical and practical significance, the toxicity induced by this kind of chemical pollutants should be deeply investigated and understood.  However, their bio-/chem- mechanisms do not be well revealed so far due to the limit of the present detection methods.  Developing novel and feasible photochemical sensing systems for As are believed to be able to overcome the issue, yet investigation involving this field has been hardly appeared. In the present proposal, several acceptors molecules featured by novel structures and “turn on” sensing mode will be designed and synthesized based on aggregation induced emission / aggregation induced emission enhancement (AIE/AIEE).  Sensing and recognizing As(III) / As(V) will be achieved for the first time by employing these acceptors, featured by high sensitivity, high selectivity and fluorescent/visual model. The sensing mechanism should be further explored.  Sensing model based on AIE/AIEE is expected to have unique spectral response with “zero background” and low background characteristic.  This performance, together with the synergic interactions induced by the aggregation, will largely enhance the signaling sensitivity; designed specific interacting sites, such as carboxylic groups resulting in a different coordination capacity between RCOO- and As species, will substantially improve the sensing selectivity in theoretical; the novel As species sensing and recognition model is believed to lead to a broad applications for constructing novel other targets chemosensors since various acceptors molecular structures and interacting groups can be theoretically chosen.