l
-Glucose
has recently been investigated as an artificial
sweetener, but no facile method is established for the measurement
of
l
-glucose. The commercial probe Eversense employs a fluorescent
diboronate in a small device for the optical monitoring of
d
-glucose in people with diabetes. Being achiral, the Eversense probe
should be able to detect
l
-glucose as well as native
d
-glucose, but the probe is designed for fixation under the
skin, and our attempts to use the probe at laboratory conditions failed,
as the probe was resetting when moved between compartments. We thus
designed a water-soluble anthracene diboronate
8
similar
to the fluorophore used in Eversense and found
8
to respond
well to
l
-glucose and other carbohydrates and artificial
sweeteners, thus enabling measurements of
l
-glucose with
the limit of quantification of 12 μM. Notably, the fluorescent
signal of diboronate
8
was largely quenched in buffers
with the physiological concentration of albumin (0.5 mM), so the given
analytical method would need more optimization to be useful for measuring
l
-glucose and other carbohydrates in blood samples. We suspect
that other diboronate fluorophores from the literature may be similarly
quenched if applied in the presence of albumin.