Collaborative Research: GCR: Convergence on Phosphorus Sensing for Understanding Global Biogeochemistry and Enabling Pollution Management and Mitigation

Phosphorus (P) is an essential element that forms the basis for all life on earth. Phosphorus plays a central role in biogeochemical cycles that broadly impact global biological productivity, food resources, and energy generation. Understanding the complex interrelationships between critical food, energy, and water resources and addressing phosphorus demand, pollution, and recovery are some of the greatest scientific challenges for future resources. At the root of these problems is the inability to measure phosphorus directly when and where one would like and to do so in a cost-effective manner. This technology gap precludes the ability to close the phosphorus cycle at regional, national, and global scales. This Growing Convergence Research project will overcome fundamental science, engineering, and prototyping challenges to enable portable, low-cost, robust, and selective sensors for phosphorus that address these critical and unmet needs. This project brings together researchers with expertise spanning supramolecular and inorganic chemistry, polymer science, soft-matter electronics, electrical engineering, and environmental and marine science. Convergent scientific, technological, and engineering advances will coalesce to realize new paradigms for control at the chemical, supramolecular, transduction, and device levels that will ultimately serve as the basis for ushering in a completely new generation of sensors for phosphorus. These sensors will satisfy the functional and economic requirements needed to provide pragmatic solutions for capturing the complexity of how phosphorus exists in space and time within agricultural landscapes, waterways, and ecosystems. Engagements with stakeholders, industrial partners, and government agencies will guide efforts towards additional applications, commercialization, and other societally relevant sensing challenges. This convergent research program will integrate basic science and engineering approaches together and combine significant intellectual and technical overlap between traditionally disparate disciplines to address long-standing challenges that have limited the development of phosphorus sensing technologies. Specific objectives of the program are to: (1) design, develop and understand how molecular recognition elements (receptors) selectively bind phosphorus in the form of inorganic and organic phosphate compounds, (2) tailor receptor-analyte-semiconductor interactions and investigate how they specifically transduce the phosphate-binding events into a sensitive signal; (3) integrate these chemistries within low-cost electronic devices; (4) engineer sensors that enable sensitive quantification in complex environments for managing the phosphorus cycle including agricultural runoff, wastewater, and fresh, brackish, estuarine, and marine environments; (5) communicate chemical phosphate detection to electronic platforms to digitize and relay this data; and (6) develop prototypes for field use and demonstrations. This holistic approach will produce field-deployable technologies for phosphorus that are low-cost, operate in real-time, and directly interface with commercial platforms broadly utilized within agricultural, environmental, and marine monitoring. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.