Nitric oxide (NO), playing crucial roles as a cellular
messenger
and as a toxic ROS, is highly related to the physiological and pathological
states of living systems. The very wide but very uneven distribution
of this radical gas in the inhomogeneous biological microenvironment
imposes big challenges for specifically detecting its local level
in certain subcellular areas, which calls for a long list of NO probes
for each target. In order to simplify the syntheses and designs of
these probes, herein it is proposed to construct a versatile NO-sensing
toolbox based on a bio-orthogonal concept, i.e., inverse electron
demand Diels–Alder click reaction between tetrazine and strained
alkyne BCN. On the one hand, rhodamine-o-phenylenediamine
as the NO-responsive scaffold is coupled with a tetrazine unit to
generate a general probe TMR-Tz-NO, which, to our knowledge, is the
first case of the tetrazine-coupled analyte-responsive probe. On the
other hand, the BCN moiety is connected to different targeting groups,
such as TPP, morpholine, and Ac4ManN, targeting to mitochondria,
lysosomes, and membranes, respectively. It works well to use TMR-Tz-NO
to match with any targetable BCN counterpart in this toolbox to achieve
the imaging of NO in the corresponding subcellular area. For example,
through metabolism, Ac4ManN-BCN is effectively taken and
grows on the cell membranes. The bio-orthogonal reaction between TMR-Tz-NO
and Ac4ManN-BCN makes the NO probe anchored to the membrane
surface permanently. The zebrafish experiment revealed that this bio-orthogonal
pair can track and image the NO produced during inflammation in vivo.