Fluoride anion recognition is attracting a mounting interest in the scientific community due to its duplicitous nature. It is a useful chemical for many industrial applications, and it has been used in human diet, but, recently it has been accused for several human pathologies. Here we describe the ample panorama of different approaches the chemists world-wide have employed to face the challenge of fluoride binding, and we outline some of the research which in our view can contribute to the development of this field, especially when fluoride binding has to be achieved in highly competitive protic solvents and water.

From being a niche area only a few decades ago, fluorous chemistry has gained momentum and is, nowadays, a fervent area of research. It has brought forth, in fact, numerous applicative innovations that stretch among different fields: from catalysis to separation science, from supramolecular to materials and analytical chemistry. Recently, the unique features of perfluorinated compounds have reached the attention of the biochemists' audience. This tutorial review introduces the basic concepts of fluorous chemistry and illustrates its main biomolecular applications. Special attention has been given to fluorous microarrays and their combination with Mass-Spectroscopy (MS) techniques, to protein properties modification by the introduction of local fluorous domains, and to the most recent applications of ¹⁹F-Magnetic Resonance Imaging ( ¹⁹F-MRI).

The fluoride anion has recently gained well deserved attention among the scientific community for its importance in many fields of human activities, but also for concerns on its effect on health and the environment. Although surprisingly overlooked in systematic studies in the past, fluoride has nowadays become a topical target in the field of anion recognition. A multitude of scientific reports are published every year where the establishment of efficient and specific interaction with fluoride is sought in polar and aqueous media. Here, the emphasis is directed to a detailed description of the most interesting contemporary studies in the field, with a particular focus given to those published in the last few years.

A detailed ¹H-NMR study of the anion binding properties of the 2-iodo-imidazolium receptor 1 in DMSO allows to fully attribute the observed affinities to strong charge-assisted C–I⋯X⁻halogen bonding (XB). Stronger binding was observed for oxoanions over halides. Phosphate, in particular, binds to 1 with an association constant of ca. 10³ M⁻¹, which is particularly high for a single X-bond. A remarkably short C–I⋯O⁻ contact is observed in the structure of the salt 1·H₂PO₄ ⁻.

Anthraquinone derived oxalamide gelator 1 forms with aromatic solvents and alcohols very stable gels which selectively respond to the presence of fluoride anion by colour change and/or gel-to-sol transition.