Regulating Energy Transfer Pathways to Construct Multicolor Luminescent Lanthanide Metal–Organic Frameworks and Their Multiorder Anticounterfeiting Barcodes and Antibiotic Sensing

We present the development of “all-in-one” layered Ln-MOFs (Ln-OXAL and Ln-GLYC; Ln = Tb, Eu) with efficient multicolor emission, multiple anticounterfeiting, and smart photoresponsive antibiotic properties. By controlling the energy transfer pathways, a series of multicolor emissions from chartreuse to red light were successfully achieved in Ln-MOFs. Furthermore, the typical fingerprint emission spectrum of Ln-MOFs with multicolor emission characteristics was utilized and further integrated into a high-capacity photonic barcode encoding library, and by employing an effective encoding strategy, a multilayered anticounterfeiting material with advanced information encryption capabilities was developed. Both Tb-OXAL and Tb-GLYC exhibit highly sensitive optical sensing abilities for detecting low concentrations of oxytetracycline, achieving limit of detection values as low as 1.35 and 7.44 μM, respectively. The integration of various applications in a specific material remains considerably challenging, primarily due to the inherent complexities in coordinating and ensuring compatibility among these varied properties.