Chemical images by porphyrin arrays of sensors

Metalloporphyrins offer almost unique opportunities to design artificial receptors for chemical sensors. These molecules can be tailored, at the synthetic level, changing in a rational way the sensor selectivity that can be oriented toward desired analyte families. Since porphyrins showed interesting properties as ionophors in liquid phase, they have been widely used to develop ion selective electrodes. These electrochemical sensors grouped in a matrix and supported by a suitable pattern recognition analysis constituted a system called electronic tongue. The present work describes in some detail the operating principle of a electronic tongue multisensor system, and a number of chemical images, coming from biological, environmental or food samples, obtained as a result of the exploitation of the device.