Ultrasensitive and rapid colorimetric detection of urotropin boosted by effective electrostatic probing and non-covalent sampling

Leakage and contamination of hazardous chemical substances have been widely recognized as the critical issue in ensuring human health, maintaining environmental sustainability, and safeguarding public security. Urotropin as a crucial raw material in industrial holds a potential threat to aquatic/atmospheric environment with refractory degradation problem, hence, there remains a severe challenge to effectively and on-site monitor urotropin. Here, a general design with all-in-one strategy was presented, in which a highly integrated "pocket sensing chip" combining a sampling unit and a detecting unit together endows a rapid and ultrasensitive colorimetric detection without dead-zone towards urotropin. By loading fast blue B as sensing reagent in the detecting unit, a moderate and sensitive detection towards urotropin via electrostatic interaction was achieved with detection limits of 9 μM for liquid and 17.19 ng for particulates. Furthermore, an expandable sensing chip for the purpose of simultaneously screening on multi-target exhibited remarkable applicability for examining suspicious objects with all sorts of surface in real scenes, being unacted on environmental complexity. We expect this design would provide a universal strategy and the high referential value to propel the development of handy and portable sensing device to efficiently screen the environmental relevant critical substance on-site.