Syntheses of Chiroptical Fluorescent Ligands for the Detection of Mercury

Abstract

Environmental protection and improvement is a very important issue facing all mankind. Mercury is an extraordinarily malicious pollutant. To curtail and remedy mercury contamination, powerful tools are needed to detect Hg(II). Mercury sensors need to be highly selective to prevent possible interference from other metal ions. They should also be sensitive since even very low concentrations of mercury can do a lot of harm. We intend to fabricate Hg(II) sensors with high selectivity and sensitivity by fusing a sulfur-containing chiral binding motif with a robust fluorophore. Syntheses of two of such ligands and their chiroptical responses to Hg(II) are reported and discussed in this work.