Naphthalimide-sulfonamide fused dansyl-sulfonamide fluorescent probe for tracking glutathione of lysosome with a dual-emission manner

Developing glutathione-specific fluorescent probes with novel fluorescence-responsive manners can enrich the applications of probes in living cells. In this work, we designed and synthesized a dual fluorophores (naphthalimide and dansyl) co-modified fluorescent probe, which displayed a high selectivity toward glutathione (GSH). In living cells, this probe could specifically visualize the GSH of lysosome and accompanied by two different fluorescence emissions. One is green emission that can be assigned to the nucleophilic substitution product (GSH-linked naphthalimide) while the other is orange emission that can be derived from the cleavage product (dansyl). Especially, such dual-emission bioimaging in living cells had a spatiotemporal and synchronous manner. It is expected to provide an alternative strategy for designing the functional fluorescent probes to be applied in multi-color bioimaging in future.