Ultrasensitive detection of chloramphenicol in water using functionalized polymers with an aluminium organic framework

Metal-Organic Frameworks (MOFs) are extensively used as electrode material in various sensing applications due to their efficacious porous nature and tunable properties. However, pristine MOFs lack conductive attributes that hinder their wide usage in electrochemical applications. Electropolymerization of several aromatic monomers has been a widely used strategy for preparing conducting electrode materials for various sensing applications in the past decades. Herein, we report a similar approach by employing the electropolymerization method to create a functional polymer layer to enhance the sensitivity of an Aluminium Organic Framework (DUT-4) for the selective detection of Chloramphenicol (CAP) antibiotic in aqueous environment. The combined strategy using the conducting polymer layer with the porous Al MOF provides surpassing electrochemical performance for sensing CAP with regard to the very low detection limit (LOD = 39 nM) and exceptionally high sensitivity (11943 μA mM−1 cm−2). In addition, the fabricated sensor exhibited good selectivity, reproducibility and stability. The developed method was successfully evaluated in various real samples including lake water and river water for CAP detection with good recovery percentages even at lower concentrations.