Ligand Chemistry of Nanomaterials for Analytical Applications

Recently, analytical features of UV-visible and fluorescence spectroscopic techniques are greatly improved by integrating nanomaterials as probes for the detection and quantification of ionic and molecular species. Advances in nanomaterials have attracted significant interest in analytical chemistry due to their unique optical and photophysical properties. The introduction of surface modified nanomaterials as probes in the absorption and fluorescence spectrometric techniques for the analysis of various target analytes. Surface modification of nanomaterials is not only enhancing the optical and physico-chemical properties, but also improve the selectivity of analyte-specific recognition, which offers impressive lower detection limits. Specific ligand chemistry on the surface of nanomaterials offers significant advantages such as conversion of non-fluorescent to fluorescent nature and improved dispersion ability in aqueous media. Surface modified nanomaterials (metal nanoparticles, metal oxides, nanoclusters, and MXenes) have been integrated with optical spectroscopic techniques (UV-Visible and fluorescence) for the development of miniaturized analytical tools for the selective and sensitive detection of wide variety of target analytes (metal ions, reactive oxygen species, drugs, pesticides and biomarkers) from various sample matrices. Finally, it is believed that the integration of surface modified nanomaterials with UV-visible and fluorescence spectroscopic techniques will offer promising analytical features for recognition of various ionic and molecular species in analytical and biomedical sciences at minimal volume of samples.