Coumarin-Based Fluorescence Probe for Differentiated Detection of Biothiols and Its Bioimaging in Cells

Abstract

In this work, a coumarin derivative, SWJT-14, was synthesized as a fluorescence probe to distinguish cysteine (Cys), homocysteine (Hcy) and glutathione (GSH) in aqueous solutions. The detection limit of Cys, Hcy and GSH for the probe was 0.02 μM, 0.42 μM and 0.92 μM, respectively, which was lower than biothiols in cells. The probe reacted with biothiols to generate different products with different conjugated structures. Additionally, it could distinguish Cys, Hcy and GSH using fluorescence and UV-Vis spectra. The detection mechanism was confirmed by MS. SWJT-14 was successfully used in cellular experiments and detected both endogenous and exogenous biothiols.

Theoretical investigation on a simple turn on fluorescent probe for detection of biothiols based on coumarin unit

“…In 2019, Song's research group constructed the first case of a fluorescent probe that can detect Cys, Hcy, GSH, and H 2 S simultaneously within four light-emitting channels (Zhang et al, 2019). Along with the continuous progress of the design concept, the study of fluorescent probes with the ability to detect biothiols simultaneously has become a hot topic in biological and medical field (Raut and Sahoo, 2021;Ding et al, 2023a;Du et al, 2023;Kaushik et al, 2023;Shellaiah and Sun, 2023;Zhang et al, 2023).…”