A New Quinone Based Fluorescent Probe for High Sensitive and Selective Detection of Biothiols and Its Application in Living Cell Imaging

In view of the vital role of biothiols in many physiological processes, the development of simple and efficient probe for the detection of biothiols is of great medical significance. In this work, we demonstrate the use of 2,3-dichloro-5,6-dicyano-1,4-benzoquinone (DDQ), which respond rapidly to biothiols especially to glutathione, as a new fluorescent probe for the selective detection and bioimaging of biothiols. This new fluorescent probe can distinguish glutathione from cysteine and homocysteine easily under physiological concentration and detect glutathione quickly within three minutes. This probe exhibits high selectivity to biothiols and the detection limit was determined to be 3.08 × 10−9 M for glutathione, 8.55 × 10−8 M for cysteine, and 2.17 × 10−9 M for homocysteine, respectively. The sensing mechanism was further explored by density functional theory (DFT) and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) experiment; results showed that the interaction forces between the probe and biothiols were electrostatic interaction. In addition, the probe has been successfully applied to the detection of biothiols in Eca9706 cells by fluorescence confocal imaging technology.