Energy transfer cassettes based on organic fluorophores: construction and applications in ratiometric sensing.

This tutorial review presents some recent developments in the construction and applications of cassettes based on resonance energy transfer between fluorescent dyes in the visible and infrared region. We focused on the contributions of different connections between the energy donor and acceptor according to the "through-space" and "through-bond" methods, and emphasised their applications in ratiometric sensing for the detection of ions and small molecules.