Development of a fast-responsive and turn on fluorescent probe with large Stokes shift for specific detection of cysteine in vivo.

Cysteine has a great effect on the physiological and pathological processes, which could bring out various diseases such as skin lesions, edema, hair depigmentation, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and liver damage due to the abnormal concentrations of cysteine. Therefore, it is of great impoatance to develop a method for imaging Cys. Herein, a novel fluorescent probe was developed for imaging Cys in vivo specially. This turn-on probe exhibited favorable advantages including large Stokes shift (90 nm), fast response (10 min), good selectivity, low cytotoxicity and so on. Furthermore, the probe could be applied to monitoring cysteine in living HeLa cells, which indicates that this turn-on probe could penetrate viable cell membranes and image Cys over other analystes especially HCy and GSH.