An Optochemical Oxygen Scavenger Enabling Spatiotemporal Control of Hypoxia.

We present an optochemical O scavenging system that enables precise spatiotemporal control of the level of hypoxia in living cells simply by adjusting the light intensity in the illuminated region. The system employs rhodamine containing a selenium or tellurium atom as an optochemical oxygen scavenger that rapidly consumes O by photochemical reaction with glutathione as a coreductant upon visible light irradiation (560-590 nm) and has a rapid response time, within a few minutes. The glutathione-consuming quantum yields of the system were calculated as about 5 %.