Media Dependent Switching of Selectivity and Continuous near Infrared Turn-on Fluorescence Response through Cascade Interactions from Noncovalent to Covalent Binding for Detection of Serum Albumin in Living Cells

Abnormal level of proteins is proved to be associated with diseases. Thus, protein sensing is helpful for clinical diagnosis and therapy. However, there is a great variety of protein species and relatively low concentration of each protein in complicated biological systems including other nonprotein biomolecules. Therefore, it remains challenging to develop an effective method for detecting protein with high selectivity and sensitivity. Herein, a new self-assembly method based on a robust dye SQSS of which two squaraine molecules were conjugated through disulfide bond was developed for highly selective and sensitive detection of serum albumin (SA) in aqueous solution and live cells. SQSS can self-assemble into “compact” aggregates, offering “inert” disulfide group and very low background fluorescence through the combination of aggregation quenching and homogeneous fluorescence resonance energy transfer (homoFRET) quenching. The response of SQSS to SA undergoes two cascade stages. At the first stage, SA drives the compact assemblies of SQSS to form loose ones with fast speed (30 s) through noncovalent interaction, resulting in the enhancement of fluorescence to some extent. In this loose assembly state, the disulfide bond in SQSS is reactive. At the second stage, the Cys34 in SA slowly induced further disassembly through covalent binding with reactive disulfide bond, resulting in fluorescence further increasing and SQSS labeling to SA that cannot be displaced by site binding ligands of SA. The self-assemblies of SQSS can selectively detect SA with continuous near-infrared (NIR) turn-on fluorescence response in 100% aqueous buffer solution. In addition, SQSS showed the potential application of imaging SA in living cells. On the other hand, the loose assembly state of SQSS was also achieved in aqueous solution with 20% CH₃CN. In this media, thiol-containing glutathione (GSH) caused the disassembly of SQSS with turn-on fluorescence response through interaction with disulfide bond. SQSS can selectively recognize GSH over other amino acids even in the presence of other sulfhydryl amino acids. As a proof-of-concept method, the molecular self-assembly through multisteps interactions would provide an ideal strategy for detection and live-cell imaging of biorelated molecules with high selectivity and signal-to-noise ratio.