Optical and electrochemical study of acridine‐based polyaza ligands for anion sensing

A variety of transition metal organometallic and coordination receptor systems which are capable of recognising and sensing anionic guest species in organic and aqueous media by electrochemical and optical methods have been already reported in literature. In many cases a redox‐active/photo‐active transition metal reporter group is used. Here, we describe two novel molecules consisting of a polyaza receptor unit for anion coordination, and an acridine moiety as signal generating unit for anion sensing. The optical and electrochemical behaviour of the two compounds was investigated in order to define novel detection schemes. With this regard, selenium anionic species, i.e. selenite (SeO32‐) and selenate (SeO42‐) were chosen as model system.