Metal-organic frameworks based fluorescent sensor array for discrimination of flavonoids

Metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) are hotly investigated as a novel kind of fluorescent sensing materials in recent years. However, the application of MOF sensing to drug analysis is still very difficult yet, because the structural similarity among drug homolog-ues exceeds the discrimination ability of MOFs. Array sensing technique, which relies on the combined responses of a group of sensing materials, is a viable way to solve this problem. In this work, we chose five luminescent MOFs with different fluorophores to construct a fluorescent sensor array for the analysis of flavonoids. With the response pattern of these MOFs and the statistical methods of linear discriminant analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis, nine flavonoids with similar structures were correctly discriminated. By the combination with UV spectrum, our method could even realize the qualification and quantification of the flavonoid samples with unknown concentrations. This work is the first time of using MOFs to successfully distinguish multiple drug homolog-ues.