Design and synthesis of fluorescent molecular probes and their applications

LUCIANA GIORDANO

Villa Carlos Paz-Córdoba

Conferencia; XIII ELAFOT; 2017

Fluorescent probes are widely used in the biologically-related disciplines and continues to grow, because it allows investigation of samples in situ and provides information with high spatial and temporal resolution. Fluorescent dyes are of particular importance because of their small size, possibility to finely tune their properties, and ease of chemical modification and functionalization. Fluorescent molecular probes are dyes that are specially designed to perform biosensing or bioimaging. Some probes can specifically target biomolecules whereas others enable detection and imaging of analytes.In my group, we are interested on the development of dyes that changes their emission characteristics in response to environmental properties such us polarity and viscosity or under irradiation with light. Solvatochromic 3-hydroxychromone (3HC) derivatives exhibit dual-color emission and thus a ratiometric response due to Excited-State Intramolecular Proton Transfer (ESIPT). They constitute very versatile and sensitive probes of environmental properties such as polarity and hydrogen-bonding capacity. BODIPY (boron difluoride dipyrromethene) is immensely popular and has many uses and application due to bright fluorescence, tunable emission spectra from visible to near-infrared, robutness and vast possibilities of funtionalization. In particular, meso-BODIPY detivatives leads to variation in emission by rotation of the meso phenyl ring with respect to dipyrromethene core allowing to map viscosity enviroment. Diarylethene derivatives possess very efficient, reproducible and fatigue resistant photochromicity ? a bimodal, reversible, photo-induced transition between two states with different absorption properties. When paired with a fluorescent donor, diarylethenes can act as switchable Förster resonance energy transfer (FRET) acceptors. Various constructs including organic dyes or quantum dots as donors have been reported in the literature. We have denoted this phenomenon as photochromic FRET (pcFRET). Sulfone derivatives of diarylethenes display fluorescence in one (closed form) of two thermally stable photochromic states.A very important objective of our work is the design and synthesis of fluorescent molecular probes as a ligand- fluorescent probe to target specific proteins, as sensor of changes in environment and combined with other imaging and therapeutic modalities for theranostic applications.