A selective fluorescent probe for hydrogen sulfide from a series of flavone derivatives and intracellular imaging.

In this work, through the orthogonal design of two fluorophores and two recognition groups, a series of fluorescent probes were developed from the flavone derivatives for hydrogen sulfide (HS). The probe FlaN-DN stood out from the primarily screening on the selectivity and response intensities. It could respond to HS with both the chromogenic and fluorescent signals. Among the recent reported probes for the HS detection, FlaN-DN indicated the most highlighted advantages including the rapid response (within 200 s) and the high response multiplication (over 100 folds). FlaN-DN was sensitive to the pH condition, thus could be applied to distinguish the cancer micro-environment. Moreover, FlaN-DN suggested practical capabilities including a wide linear range (0-400 μM), a relatively high sensitivity (limit of detection 0.13 μM), and high selectivity towards HS. As a low cytotoxic probe, FlaN-DN achieved the imaging in living HeLa cells. FlaN-DN could detect the endogenous generation HS and visualize the dose-dependent responses to the exogenous HS level. This work provided a typical case of natural-sourced derivatives as functional implements, which might inspire the future investigations.