The first synthesis of sulfone-pyronin and sulfone-rosamine dyes bearing optically tunable primary amino groups (acting as fluorogenic centers) is presented. Sulfone analogs of xanthene-based fluorophores have recently been highlighted as a new class of near-infrared (NIR) fluorescent dyes (Liu et al. ACS Appl Mater Interfaces 2016;8(35):22953-62), and the availability of fluorogenic derivatives is essential for the rapid construction of "turn-on" reactive probes for chemoselective bioimaging. However, these fluorescent anilines have been found to be unstable in aqueous physiological conditions due to the marked electrophilicity of their meso-position and hence its propensity to undergo nucleophilic attack by a water molecule or a hydroxyde anion. Further investigations have helped us to determine the acidic pH range at which the sulfone-rosamine 2 is fully-stable and a complete assessment of the photophysical properties could be performed. Its pro-fluorescent character and utility were then proved by the preparation and in vitro enzymatic activation of a penicillin G acylase (PGA) sensitive fluorogenic probe.

also been explored to rapidly access to near-infrared (NIR) fluorogenic dyes for more challenging biosensing/bioimaging applications, especially in vivo 14-17 (Fig. 1).

Fluorogenic detection of reactive (bio)analytes is often achieved with "smart" probes, whose activation mechanism causes the release of aniline-based fluorophores. Indeed, the protection-deprotection of their primary amino is the simplest way to induce dramatic and valuable changes in spectral features of the fluorogenic reporter. In this context, and due to their small size and intrinsic hydrophilicity, we focused on pyronin dyes and related heteroatom analogs (i.e., formal derivatives of 3-imino-3H-xanthen-6-amine and its silicon analog) for their use as optically tunable aniline-based fluorophores. To overcome some severe limitations associated with the use of such fluorogenic scaffolds (i.e., poor aqueous stability and spectral features only in the green-yellow spectral range), the synthesis of novel unsymmetrical derivatives of (Si)-pyronins bearing a single bulky tertiary aniline (i.e., N-methylindoline and julolidine) was explored and presented in this Article. This structural alteration has been found to be beneficial to dramatically lower electrophilicity of the meso-position and to reach attractive fluorescence properties within the far-red spectral region. File list (2) download file view on ChemRxiv Publication-GD4-ChemRxiv-Preprint-31032020.pdf (837.64 KiB) download file view on ChemRxiv Publication-GD04-ChemRxiv-SI-31032020.pdf (6.54 MiB)

Experimental procedures, spectroscopic and analytical data, IR, NMR, MS and UV-vis/fluorescence spectra, elution profiles for all RP-HPLC-fluorescence/-MS analyses (PDF). The Supporting Information is available free of charge at xxx.