Method for Selecting Combinations of Optical Chemosensory Materials for Identification of Vapor-Phase Ecotoxicants

Abstract

Introduction. Environmental pollution represents a serious threat to the public and ecological safety. Cross-reactive optical chemosensor materials and their combinations can be effectively used for timely identification of ecotoxicants in the vapor phase. The selection of chemosensor combinations for a reliable identification of toxic substances has received insufficient research attention. As a rule, all available chemosensor materials are used, although a smaller combination may be more reliable and informative.Aim. To propose a method for selecting from a set of available chemosensory materials the optimal combination most suitable for identification of the required group of vapor-phase substances.Materials and methods. A metric for assessing the quality of a chemosensor material combination for identification of toxic substances is proposed. This metric numerically describes the degree of orthogonality and the proximity of distributions of response vectors of the combination to the exposure to analyzed substances. On the basis of the metric, a method for selecting optimal combinations is formulated. Classification models based on the support vector method and the principal components method are used to classify responses of the combination of materials. The proposed method is tested on the example of selecting combinations of permeable fluorescent materials for identification of saturated vapor-phase nitroaromatic ecotoxicants and interfering substances.Results. A combination of permeable fluorescent materials, sufficiently reliable for identification of vapor-phase nitroaromatic ecotoxicants, was determined. The possibility of rapid identification of toxic substances during the prolonged exposure of materials to their vapors is presented. It is shown that the quality metric is lower for a combination of all available fluorescent materials compared to a smaller combination selected via the proposed method.Conclusion. An approach to solving the problem of finding an optimal combination of chemosensory materials for identification of the specified group of substances is proposed. The proposed method increases the reliability of identification of toxic substances while reducing the number of chemosensory materials involved in the process.

Keywords

• fluorescent chemosensory materials
• selection of combinations
• identification
• nitroaromatic ecotoxicants