Allosteric signal-amplification sensing with polymer-based supramolecular hosts

The lock-and-key principle is a fundamental substance to create chemosensors that sense target analytes. Our results based on the lock-and-key concept, i.e., inherently chiral molecular clips and resorcin[4]arenes, were introduced and their inherent problems were also explained. Hence, a novel sensing methodology, “supramolecular allosteric signal-amplification sensing” (SASS), has been proposed to develop functional polythiophenes and polysaccharides for amino acids, peptides, and oligosaccharides that are difficult to sense. The polythiophene sensors showed amplified responses through a positive allosterism, and the polysaccharide sensors capture oligosaccharides in aqueous media and then were expanded to an extremely sensitive in situ oligosaccharide sensor that is dynamically controllable. The present SASS strategy using polymer chemosensors that behave very differently from common ones is essentially based on an allosterically molecular information propagation, upon interaction of an analyte to a chemosensor’s binding pocket, to an amplifying polymer reporter.