Levonorgestrel protected Au10 cluster for hypochlorite sensing in living organisms.

BACKGROUND

Highly reactive oxygen species (ROS) could lead to serious damage in living cells and are associated with many diseases like cancers. Metal cluster with strong fluorescence has great potential in biosensing and many thiolate ligands-protected clusters have been applied in ROS sensing.

RESULTS

In this work, we synthesized levonorgestrel protected Au10 cluster with specific sensing ability for highly ROS via crystal transformation from Au8 cluster, demonstrating the significance of inner core structure on detecting performance. The detection limit of Au10 cluster for ClO- could reach as low as 0.1 μM. This fluorescent probe not only achieving detection of exogenous ClO- in living cells and zebrafish, but also successful imaging of endogenous ClO- in HeLa and HepG2 cells.

SIGNIFICANCE: In comparison to previously reported cluster-based sensors for ROS, this work proposes a different reaction mechanism of metal nanoclusters for ROS detection (breakage of gold-alkynyl bond and oxidation of alkynyl group). This provides new directions for designing specific ROS probes and broadens the applications of metal clusters in disease diagnostics.