Tunable fluorescent probes for detecting aldehydes in living systems.

Aldehydes, pervasive in various environments, pose health risks at elevated levels due to their collective toxic effects shared mechanisms. Monitoring total aldehyde content in living systems is crucial due to their cumulative impact. Current methods for detecting cellular aldehydes are limited to UV and visible ranges, restricting their analysis in living systems.

Tunable heteroaromatic azoline thioethers (HATs) for cysteine profiling.

Here we report a new series of hydrolytically stable chemotype heteroaromatic azoline thioethers (HATs) to achieve highly selective, rapid, and efficient covalent labeling of cysteine under physiological conditions. Although the resulting cysteine-azoline conjugate is stable, we highlight traceless decoupling of the conjugate to afford unmodified starting components in response to reducing conditions. We demonstrated that HAT probes reverse the reactivity of nucleophilic cysteine to electrophilic dehydroalanine (Dha) under mild basic conditions.