Small-molecule organic fluorophores have become an essential tool for imaging and sensing in biochemistry, biophysics, molecular biology, medicine, and material sciences. Among them, xanthene dyes such as rhodamines and fluorescein have been widely employed for various fluorescent probe formations. These dyes many advantageous fluorescence imaging property such as good water solubility, high fluorescence quantum yield and molar extinction coefficient. However, typical xanthene dyes show emission wavelength approximately at 500–600 nm and very small Stokes’ shift. So xanthene dyes which emit at longer wavelength regions with large Stokes’ shift are in great demand to discover new possibilities for bioimaging.
Toward this, Si-rhodamine dyes have been developed by replacing the O-atom of xanthene core with Si-atom to observe the bathochromic shift of their absorption and fluorescence wavelengths. Still Si-rhodamine dyes show a very small Stokes’ shift (~20 nm). Accordingly herein, we developed a new class of dyes called amino-Si-rhodamines (ASiR) by introducing amine group at 9 position of Si-rhodamine to observe a large Stokes’ shift (~130 nm).
ASiR dyes show highly promising photophysical properties under one-photon ecitation as well as two-photon excitation. Two-photon active photophysical property of ASiR enable their applicability for bioimaging coupled with two-photon microscopy. |