A simple fluorescent probe, with a latent coumarin fluorophore and an acrylate recognition site, is able to selectively and quantificationally detect cysteine over other biothiols, such as homocysteine and glutathione.

A fluorescent probe, with coumarin as the fluorophore, is capable of detecting cysteine over other biothiols, such as homocysteine and glutathione.

A fluorescent probe, with simplicity of structure and convenience of synthesis, is capable of detecting cysteine over other biothiols, such as homocysteine and glutathione. The detection limit of 60 nM and 190-fold increase in fluorescence intensity offer advantage for detection of Cys in biological systems. Furthermore, the probe 1 could be applied in bioimaging.

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With the improvement and advance in cancer diagnosis and treatment, the cancer is still a major cause of morbidity and mortality throughout the world. Obviously, new breakthroughs in therapies remain be urgent needed. In this work, we designed and synthesized the compound 1-4, namely resveratrol analogues with methylation of hydroxy distyrene, to further explore its new anti-cancer potential. Encouragingly, compound 1 ((E)-4,4′-(ethene-1,2-diyl) bis(3,5-dimethylphenol)) exhibited cytotoxicity superior to resveratrol in MCF 7 cells. More importantly, the compound 1 showed greater toxicity to tumor cells than that to normal cells, which proved that it could selectively kill tumor cells. The favorable results encouraged us to explore the inhibitory mechanism of compound 1 on MCF 7 cells. The research finding indicated the compound 1 inhibited tumor cell proliferation by both arresting cell cycle in S phase and apoptosis via a prooxidant manner. In addition, the results further verified compound 1 caused cell cycle arrest in S phase and apoptosis by down-regulation of the cycling A1/cycling A2 expression and the rise of Bax/ Bcl-2 ratio in a p21-dependant pathway in MCF 7 cells. Therefore, these results are helpful for the effective design of anticancer reagents and the better understanding of their mechanism of action.

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A simple and coumarin-based fluorescence probe has been designed and synthesized with silyl group as recognition group of fluoride ions (F−) in this study. The results showed that the fluorescence intensity of the probe displayed prominent enhancement with addition of F− at 445 nm with incubation of 1 min. There was an excellent linear relationship between fluorescence intensity and fluoride concentration from 0 to 30 μM (0~0.57 ppm), which offered the important condition for the quantitative analysis. In addition, the highly selective response to fluorion, the low detection limit with 28 nM (0.532 ppb), low toxicity and bioimaging afforded an advantage for practical application and detecting fluoride in biological systerms.