A water-stable terbium-based MOF fluorescence sensor for rapid and highly sensitive quantitative detection of cefixime

Antibiotics play an important role in human life, but the abuse of antibiotics not only damages people's health but also poses a potential threat to the environment. Hence, the development of a rapid and efficient antibiotic detection method has profound significance. Herein, a novel terbium-based metal-organic framework (Tb-MOF) [Tb 2 (0.5BPDC) 4 (BPDC)(DMF) 2 .DMF] was prepared by a one-step solvothermal method . The framework structure of the synthesized Tb-MOF remained stable not only under different acidic and alkaline environments but also under different organic reagents. In view of the quenching effect of cefixime (CFX) on the fluorescence of Tb-MOF, a method for the detection of CFX was constructed with a linear range of 0.1–150 μM and a detection limit of 31.55 nM. The quenching mechanism was revealed by ultraviolet–visible absorption spectroscopy (UV–vis), fluorescence lifetime and density functional theory (DFT) to be attributed to the internal filtration effect (IFE) and photoinduced electron transfer (PET). Tb-MOF was applied to the quantitative analysis of CFX in environmental water samples and tablets, and the recovery rate was 98.4%–104.8%, which verified its practicability. Therefore, the prepared Tb-MOF is a potential fluorescence sensing platform for rapid and sensitive detection of CFX in actual samples.