Demystifying the coordination polymers triggered fluorescence immunoassay: State of the art and future perspectives

Fluorescence immunoassay has shown attractive potential for advancing public health due to its merits of integrating the superior specificity of immunological recognition and brilliant sensitivity of fluorescence sensors. Over the past decades, coordination polymers (CPs) have been actively pursued in the construction of fluorescence immunoassays because of their propensity for surface engineering, high compositional diversity and structural flexibility. These virtues endow CPs with immense feasibility in the target-oriented manufacturing of sensing platforms for specific applications. Despite the fact that numerous reviews on luminescent CPs or immunoassays from various perspectives have been published, a comprehensive review of CPs-based fluorescence immunoassay with sensing subjects is still lacking, and it must be organized in an all-inclusive manner with an in-depth discussion of the detection mechanisms. To better facilitate the development of this field, the fluorescence mechanism of CPs, general fluorescence sensing mechanism, and mechanism of CPs-driven fluorescence immunoassay was demystified before systematically highlighting the current state of the art in this field. Accordingly, recent applications were discussed after being classified into four categories based on the function of CPs, including direct use-, disintegration-, reaction-, and mediated-type. The objective of this review is to provide readers with an extensive overview, prospective challenges, and future perspectives for rational design of CPs-based fluorescence immunoassays.