Porous adaptive luminescent metallacage for the detection and removal of perfluoroalkyl carboxylic acids

Per- and poly-fluoroalkyl carboxylic acids (PFCAs) accumulate in water resources and pose serious environmental and health threats due to their non-biodegradable nature and long environmental persistence times. Strategies for the simultaneous detection and removal of PFCAs are urgently needed to address this concern. Here, we report a porous adaptive luminescent zinc-metallacage (Zn-Cage) crystal that exhibits high sensitivity for PFCAs in contaminated water and which permits their monitoring with a limit of detection (LOD) as low as 57 nM. A smartphone with a color-scanning application allowed for the real-time/in situ visual detection of PFCAs at various concentrations. The present porous adaptive Zn-Cage allowed representative PFCAs, namely perfluorohexanoic acid (PFHxA), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and perfluorodecanoic acid (PFDA), to be removed from simulated contaminated water samples with high absorption efficiency.