Preparation of Molecular Self-Assembled Chemosensors without Organic Synthesis and Their Arrays

Herein, we propose methodologies using off-the-shelf reagents to obtain chemosensors without organic synthesis. In this system, the off-the-shelf reagents, which are selected considering their intermolecular interactions, play crucial roles as functional building blocks in preparing molecular self-assembled chemosensors. The roles of molecular self-assemblies are not only to eliminate the need for synthesis in preparing chemosensors, but also to obtain information-rich optical responses upon detecting various analytes. Such inherent cross reactivity of the self-assembled chemosensors can contribute to obtaining fingerprint-like responses depending on chemical structures of analytes and their concentrations, and the beneficial properties of the chemosensors have been applied to pattern recognition for qualitative and quantitative discrimination. As actual approaches using off-the-shelf building blocks, this review describes three types of self-assembled chemosensors; 1) turn-on type fluorescent chemosensors for saccharides, 2) colorimetric chemosensors for oxyanions, and 3) a single fluorescent chemosensor for pattern recognition of metal ions. The high applicability of the proposed approach based on intermolecular interactions indicates the potential of off the-shelf building blocks for real-sample analysis. The authors believe that this methodology will open a new avenue to establish chemical sensor platforms for anyone who is not familiar with chemical experiments.