Rational Design of Pyrido[3,2-<i>b</i>]indolizine as a Tunable Fluorescent Scaffold for Fluorogenic Bioimaging
Sihyeong Yi, Dahham Kim, Wansang Cho, Jung Ho Lee, Ji Hoon Kwon, Jonghoon Kim, Seung Bum Park
Abstract
High Resolution Image Download MS PowerPoint Slide Novel fluorescent scaffolds are highly demanding for a wide range of applications in biomedical investigation. To meet this demand, the pyrido[3,2- b ]indolizine scaffold was designed as a versatile organic fluorophore. With the aid of computational modeling, fluorophores offering tunable emission colors (blue to red) were constructed. Notably, constructed fluorophores absorb lights in the visible range (>400 nm) despite their small sizes (<300 g/mol). Among the fluorophores was discovered a highly fluorogenic fluorophore with a unique turn-on property, 1, and it was developed into a washing-free bioprobe for visualizing cellular lipid droplets in living cells. Furthermore, motivated by the core’s compact size and structural analogy to indole, unprecedented tryptophan-analogous fluorogenic unnatural amino acids were constructed and incorporated into fluorogenic peptide probes for monitoring peptide–protein interactions.