Attractive benzothiazole-based fluorescence probe for the highly efficient detection of hydrogen peroxide

In current work, one novel benzothiazole-based fluorescent chemosensor (TZ-BO) with ESIPT luminescence mechanism was designed for the detection of hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) as typical reactive oxygen species (ROS). The boronate catenary in our designed probe molecule TZ-BO is both the blocking group of ESIPT and the reactive group of H2O2. The synthesized probe TZ-BO has the advantages of large Stokes shift, high sensitivity, good selectivity, and fast reaction speed to H2O2. The ability of the probe to detect H2O2 in aqueous media and exogenous H2O2 in cells by fluorescence signal was investigated. The experimental results manifested that probe TZ-BO is able to sensitively detect H2O2 using a fluorescence method in an excellent linear range of H2O2 concentration from 0 to 60 μM (R2 = 0.994). The detection limit was determined as 1.0 × 10-6 M. Most importantly, the probe TZ-BO with highly low cytotoxicity can effectively detect exogenous H2O2 in HeLa cells. This probe provides a promising tool for monitoring the real concentration level of H2O2 in related physiological and pathological researches.