Parallel Synthesis and Screening of Supramolecular Chemosensors That Achieve Fluorescent Turn-on Detection of Drugs in Saliva

Programming and controlling molecular recognition in aqueous solutions is increasingly common, but creating supramolecular sensors that detect analytes in biologically relevant solutions remains a nontrivial task. We report here a parallel synthesis-driven approach to create a family of self-assembling dimeric sensors that we call DimerDyes and its use for the rapid identification of salt-tolerant sensors for illicit drugs. We developed an efficient method that involves parallel synthesis and screening in crude form without the need to purify each potential sensor. Structurally diverse "hit" DimerDyes were resynthesized and purified and were each shown to assemble into homodimers in water in the programmed way. DimerDyes provided a "turn-on" fluorescence detection of multiple illicit drugs at low micromolar concentrations in water and in saliva. The combination of multiple agents into a sensor array was successfully able to detect and discriminate between closely related drugs and metabolites in multiple important drug families.