Analyte-Driven Disassembly and Turn-On Fluorescent Sensing in Competitive Biological Media

• DOI: 10.1021/jacs.7b13298
• Publication Date: 2018-02-20T21:34:04Z
• Authors: Meagan A. Beatty; Jorge Borges-Gonz...; Nicholas J. Sinclair; Aidan T. Pye; Fraser Hof
• Keywords: Biomolecule; Calixarene; Turn (biochemistry); Bioconjugation; Merocyanine

Many indicator displacement assays can detect biological analytes in water, but these often have reduced performance the presence of an unavoidable component: NaCl. We report here a new self-assembled sensor, DimerDye, that uses novel photochemical guest-sensing mechanism and is intrinsically tolerant cosolutes. synthetically integrated dye into calixarene macrocycle, forming two merocyanine calixarenes (MCx-1 MCx-2). Both compounds self-assemble nonemissive dimers water. The addition good guests like trimethyllysine induces turn-on fluorescence response MCx-1 due to simultaneous dimer dissociation formation emissive host–guest complex. DimerDyes remain functional solutions containing various salts, metal ions, cofactors are needed for enzymatic reactions. provides real-time, signal lysine methyltransferase reaction PRDM9.