Optical sensing of the chemical warfare agent mustard gas and its simulants: a minireview emphasizing fluorescence and colorimetric responses.

Mustard gas, a chemical warfare agent and a type of blister agent, continues to pose a threat to civilian life and public safety. Consequently, there is an urgent need to develop portable, highly sensitive, interference-resistant, and stable detection technologies. Currently, fluorescent probes and colorimetric sensors are emerging as prominent topics in this field, offering advantages such as ease of operation, rapid response times, high sensitivity, and visual detection capabilities. This paper reviews recent advances in fluorescent probes and colorimetric sensors for detecting mustard gas and its simulants, systematically summarizing innovations in reaction types and conditions, recognition sites, response mechanisms, and detection performance. It also addresses current challenges, including the scarcity of gas-solid phase detection methods, the need to improve sensitivity, solvent dependency, and the lack of field detection technologies tailored to real-world scenarios and actual chemical agents. Finally, the paper outlines future research directions.