Boronic acid sensors for saccharides: A theoretical study

Selective detection of saccharides by fluorescent boronic acid sensors has been the object of active research over the last two decades with numerous experimental reports published. A theoretical study is presented here on pyrene- and anthracene-boronic acid systems and their fluorescent sensing of d-glucose, employing Density Functional Theory and Time-Dependent Density Functional Theory. The difficulties encountered by straight-forward computational approaches are described while it is shown that it is possible to obtain a physically correct description of the photoinduced electron transfer in these systems from diagrams of the molecular orbital energies of the separate donor and acceptor moieties.