A novel fluorescent chemosensor for detection of Zn(II) ions based on dansyl-appended dipeptide in two different living cells.

This paper describes a new fluorescent chemosensor (DSH) based on dipeptide conjugated with dansyl group, which was synthesized by solid phase peptide synthesis (SPPS) technology. DSH exhibited a highly selective and sensitive toward Zn2+ ions by "turn-on" response based on generation of monomer-excimer mechanism in aqueous solutions, and the detection limit was calculated at 11.2 nM. In addition, the reversible of DSH-Zn with Na2EDTA establishes the reuse of DSH, and the circulation effect was very good. Moreover, DSH had good water solubility, and was successfully applied to bioimage intracellular Zn2+ ions and Na2EDTA in two different living cells with exciting cellular permeability and low cytotoxicity, which indicated that DSH had great potential in the application of biological imaging.