Highly luminescent sensing for nitrofurans and tetracyclines in water based on zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 incorporated with dyes

Antibiotics are one of the emerging contaminants in water, which have a great impact on ecosystems and human health. It has been challenging to simultaneously realize low-cost, rapid, highly sensitive and selective detection of antibiotics with conventional methods. Here, we report luminescent chemosensors for detecting antibiotics in water, based on metal-organic framework (MOF), i.e., zeolitic imidazolate framework-8 (ZIF-8), loaded with rhodamine B (RhB) and fluorescein disodium salt (FSS) dyes. Compared with ZIF-8, the fluorescence signals of RhB@ZIF-8 and FSS@ZIF-8 were significantly improved and presented ultrahigh sensitivity to nitrofurans (NFAs) and tetracyclines (TCs) with fluorescence quenching and fluorescence enhancement in water, respectively. The unique structures and properties of RhB@ZIF-8 and FSS@ZIF-8 lead to outstanding sensitivities in antibiotic detection. For instance, the RhB@ZIF-8 sensor shows the lower limit of detection (LOD) of 0.26 mu M to nitrofurantoin (NFT), 0.47 mu M to nitrofurazone (NFZ), 0.11 mu M to tetracycline (TC), and 0.14 mu M to oxytetracycline (OTC); while the FSS@ZIF-8 sensor shows the LOD of 0.31 mu M to NFT, 0.35 mu M to NFZ, 0.17 mu M to TC, and 0.16 mu M to OTC. In addition, NFT and TC were also successfully detected by FSS@ZIF-8 in water from real water environment. The results indicate that dye@MOF-based luminescent composites are favorable for antibiotic detection, presenting great potentials in water quality monitoring.