The interest to use of synthetic transport systems for sensing is somewhat obvious because our tongue and nose operate with responsive systems in lipid bilayer membranes.  However, little work has been done in this direction, and we felt that we could contribute to improve on this situation.  Over the years, the three main sensing methods have been adapted to synthetic transport systems.  Biosensors, sensors that work with enzymes for signal generation, have been exemplified early on with an artificial tongue (sensors for sucrose, lactose, glucose, lactate, citrate, glutamate).  Very robust, biosensing with synthetic transport systems has later on been expanded to sensors for inositol phosphates (phytate, IP7), cholesterol and polyphenols.  The same powerful approach offers fluorogenic assays for virtually any enzyme of interest.  The aptamer version of immunosensing was realized with sticky-end aptamer-antiaptamer DNA polymers that function as counterion-activated cation transporters in fluorogenic vesicles but disassemble in response to analyte binding.  Differential sensors were the hardest to realize.  This was surprising because many chemosensors work like this and the only way our nose can differentiate more than 10000 odorants with about 350 receptors is to generate patterns that are then recognized in the brain.  The problem with synthetic transport systems was the generation of patterns, the solution was dynamic covalent chemistry.  The resulting artificial nose identified all tested odorants and perfumes in the virtual principal component space, including very similar ones such as enantiomers (muscone, citronellal) or cis-trans isomers (cucumber aldehyde).

Currently, we are also highly interested in conceptually innovative fluorescent probes that explore mechanisms that account for the color change of lobsters during cooking or the chemistry of color vision, and can directly sense important characteristics of lipid bilayer membranes (order, tension, potential).