A novel isophorone-based red-emitting/NIR probe for thiophenol and its application in real water sample and vivo.

Fast, highly selective and sensitive thiophenol probes are highly desirable in the field of bioimaging and environmental monitoring. For that, based on the mechanism that thiophenol can effectively cleave the sulfonamide bond selectively, we herein report a dicyanoisophorone-based Red-emitting/NIR probe for thiophenol detection. This probe had some desirable properties such as rapid response, high selectivity and sensitivity, remarkable large Stokes shift (181 nm), Red-emitting/NIR fluorescence region and low LOD value (80 nM, according to 3σ/s). Moreover, this novel Red-emitting/NIR probe can potentially be applied to the detection of thiophenols in real water samples quantitatively and fluorescent imaging in living cells and zebrafishes.