Ultra-trace recognition and removal of toxic chromium (VI) ions from water using visual mesocaptor

The key to designing optical mesocaptors is to construct a chromogenic receptor, namely, diphenylcarbazide (DPC), as a nanoscale platform scavenger with different functional characteristics, such as density, accessibility, and intrinsic mobility. Engineering of optical captors allows facile and reliable signaling in continuous monitoring modes, and enables simple and high-speed removal of toxic chromium (VI) ions. Mesoporous aluminosilica monoliths, with unique morphologies, active surface sites, and physical properties, enhance sensing/removal characteristics in terms of sensitivity, selectivity, and response time. The systematic design of optical mesocaptor is based on a densely patterned selective binding site (DPC) in engineered mesocylinder carriers that have multidirectional pores and microsized particle-like monoliths to control the adsorption/detection assays of Cr(VI) ions. Synthetic mesocaptor can be used for visual removal of Cr(VI) ions even at low concentration levels of 10(-10) M (i.e., 0.07 ppb) with rapid response time in minutes. Moreover, these new classes of design-made hybrid mesocaptor exhibit long-term signaling stability and recognition functionalities that provided extraordinary sensitivity, selectivity, reusability, and fast kinetic detection and quantification of various deleterious metal ions in the environment. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.