Lanthanide metal-organic frameworks with nitrogen functional sites for the highly selective and sensitive detection of NADPH.

A series of isostructural Ln-MOFs, namely Eu(BPDC-xN)(x = 0, 1, 2), with different numbers of nitrogen atoms were designed and synthesized. Due to the strong affinity between the bare phosphate group of NADPH and nitrogen functional sites, the highly selective and sensitive detection of NADPH was realized. Furthermore, as the number of sites was increased, the sensitivity significantly increased, with a detection limit as low as 0.43 μM.