Some people think of a certain breakfast cereals. A kaleidoscope-like film for telling different sweeteners apart has been reported by researchers. The unique shifts in the intensity of 14 sugars tagged with a dye were enhanced when evenly stretched with a simple apparatus.
Sweet tastes in drinks can come from many types of sugar, including sucrose, fructose andglucose, as well as less common ones. The sugars in people's sweat could be tracked to see if they have a high or low blood sugar. It's difficult to tell which molecule is present based on taste or look alone, but they are usually identified with complex methods and sophisticated instruments. In order to make the detection process simpler, Fengyu Li and colleagues used a color-changing chip sensor that distinguished 12 different sugars. The team wanted to see if the platform could detect and differentiate sugars, since they weren't Wearable.
A film of polyethyl acrylate was put into by the researchers. When it was stretched with a uniform force, the gummy material turned into a rainbow of colors, from red to pink to orange to yellow to green. The kaleidoscope of colors was created when the material was pulled by hand.
The researchers found that stretching the film enhanced the fluorescent signals from the sugars. The signals could be sorted. They mixed six commercially available drinks with a dye and created fluorescent complexes to see if the sensor could do the same. The film was stretched and the complexes were dotted onto it. Each sample's sugar-dye complexes produced unique signals. Six sweat samples were differentiated by the sensor. The researchers say that the stretchable, multicolored material could be incorporated into Wearable Devices for environmental, clinical or health monitoring of sugar or other substances.
There is more information about A Rainbow Structural Color by Stretchable Photonic Crystal for Saccharide identification. The book is titled "acsnano.2c08708."
Journal information: ACS Nano
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