Acid-base properties of methyl orange, bromocresol green, bromophenol blue, and bromothymol blue were thoroughly investigated in the past due to their application as colorimetric pH indicators. However, it is still unknown how these properties change upon the supramolecular host-guest interactions. Owing to the growing interest in using supramolecular host-guest interactions to reach expected modification of various physicochemical properties of guests, we decided to address this question in the present article. We estimated the shifts of pKa values induced by diverse hosts (cyclodextrins, cucurbiturils, calixarenes, micelles, and serum albumin) and performed a thermodynamic analysis of the selected systems. To make a deeper insight, we confronted the aforementioned dyes with the other kinds of molecules studied by us in the past. In overall, the results obtained demonstrate a large multiplicity of possible pKa behaviors, their poor predictability, and the existence of subtle structure-acidity relationships. In addition, we observed three thermodynamically different mechanisms of pKa alteration. Therefore, more studies are needed to bring closer the promising perspective of a programmable acidity's tuning. Our methodology was based on capillary electrophoresis (CE) applied in two parallel variants: a classical method based on the fitting of a nonlinear function, and an alternative two-value method (TVM), which requires over twice less measurements to estimate pKa. To identify the optimal approach for further studies, both methods were comprehensively compared and discussed based on the RGB additive color model, a user-friendly scale that integrates three primary aspects of an analytical method: analytical performance, green chemistry, and practicality.
Keywords: Acidity; Capillary electrophoresis; Host-guest interaction; RGB model; Supramolecular chemistry; pH indicator.