A novel isophorone-based fluorescent probe for recognition of Al and its bioimaging in cells and plants.

In this work, a novel isophorone-based fluorescent probe H-1 was designed and synthesized. The probe H-1 could achieve highly selective detection of Al through forming a 1:1 complex, with a recognition mechanism based on intramolecular charge transfer (ICT). The detection limit of the probe H-1 for Al is as low as 8.25 × 10 M which was determined by fluorescent titration. It is confirmed that H-1 could be used not only for fluorescence spectrometry to detect Al ions in actual water samples, but also for biological imaging to detect Al ions in cells and plants.