Monitoring water quality is essential to public health and food production. Current methods to detect dilute pollutants in water, for instance, sugars (indicators of bacterial contamination), suffer from high costs and complexity. Boronic acids can be used as receptors in chemical sensors for sugars due to the reversible interactions of boronic acids with diols. However, the binding affinity and solubility of boronic acids are poor in water, which significantly limits carbohydrate sensing in physiological conditions. We improved these parameters by covalently connecting phenylboronic acid moieties to a hydrophilic poly(methacrylic acid) (PMAA) to generate a water-soluble poly(methacrylic acid)-co-3-(acrylamide)phenylboronic acid (PMAA-co-AAPBA) random co-polymer as a receptor. The co-polymer was characterized by <sup>1</sup>H NMR, GPC and FTIR and contains 6% molar ratio of boronic acid moieties with a molecular weight of 40500 Da (PDI = 1.2). We first monitored the binding interactions, via absorbance and fluorescence spectroscopy, of the phenylboronic acid moieties of the co-polymer with diol containing hematoxylin dye. Indicator displacement assay was used to study the interaction of the PMAA-co-AAPBA receptor with simple sugars.  The sugars’ binding affinity to PMAA-co-AAPBA was determined by the displacement of the bound dyes on the boronic acid moieties after the addition of monosaccharides (e.g. fructose, glucose, galactose, and ribose) and disaccharides (e.g. lactose, maltose, sucrose, and trehalose). We found that the [PMAA-co-AAPBA●dye] complex successfully detected both monosaccharides and disaccharides in aqueous solution. We also demonstrated the use of these polymer-based sensors in a multivariate array sensing platform for the discrimination of sugars in water as a proof of principle towards broader applications in physiologically and environmentally relevant conditions.

Carbohydrate sensing using water-soluble poly(methacrylic acid)-co-3-(acrylamide)phenylboronic acid co-polymer

256th National Meeting (2018)

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