Naphthalimides for labeling and sensing applications

Abstract

Naphthalimide has now become a class of most popular fluorophores for probe design, along with coumarin, fluorescein, rhodamine, BODIPY and cyanine. This account aims at the first-year graduate students as the primary audience and showcases the versatile design principles applicable to the naphthalimide fluorophore when designing a probe or label, with focused examples from the Qian research laboratory. We also provide a general synthetic scheme to naphthalimides of various substitution patterns.