Influence of surfactant and chromoionophore type on the performance of generic lipophilic anion-sensitive nanospheres

The performance of sensors is of great importance in all real-world applications such as clinical diagnostics, bioimaging, cosmetology. In order to get satisfactory results, it is necessary to optimize the composition of chemo sensitive part of the sensor and for electronic tongue applications special care must be taken in this aspect. The designed sensors must be cross-sensitive, i.e. having affinity towards various analytes, maintaining simultaneously high sensitivity value. In this study, an attempt was made to optimize the composition of miniaturized ion-based optical sensors (IBOS) fabricated in the form of nanospheres. They were designed to exhibit sensitivity towards lipophilic anions. Four various surfactants and two kinds of chromoionophores were applied to fabricate nanospheres whose spectrophotometric and spectrofluorimetric response towards perchlorates was studied. These two components of nanosperes play very important role in such system because they govern its stability and size (surfactant) and define its optical response (chromoionophore).