Coumarin-based fluorescent 'AND' logic gate probes for the detection of homocysteine and a chosen biological analyte

Abstract

With this research we set out to develop a number of coumarin-based 'AND' logic fluorescence probes that were capable of detecting a chosen analyte in the presence of HCys. Probe JEG-CAB was constructed by attaching the ONOO- reactive unit, benzyl boronate ester, to a HCys/Cys reactive fluorescent probe, CAH. Similarly, the core unit CAH was functionalised with the nitroreductase (NTR) reactive p-nitrobenzyl unit to produce probe JEG-CAN. Both, JEG-CAB and JEG-CAN exhibited a significant fluorescence increase when exposed to either HCys and ONOO- (JEG-CAB) or HCys and NTR (JEG-CAN) thus demonstrating their effectiveness to function as AND logic gates for HCys and a chosen analyte.