Design and synthesis of fluorescent sensors for zinc based on photoinduced electron transfer (PET)

Chemistry has become an important tool in solving problems in biology and medicine. Chemists are engaged in developing new devices at the nanoscale level to aid in clinical diagnosis, real time monitoring of analytes, and analyzing neural activity, etc. Our research is aimed at designing and synthesizing fluorescent sensors to detect various divalent metal ions under physiological conditions.; We designed and synthesized a chemosensor based on the principle of photoinduced electron transfer as a signal transduction mechanism in order to detect the presence of various divalent metal cations, particularly zinc. We report the synthesis, characterization and its spectrophotometric titrations with various metal ions. This sensor signals the presence of metal ions by a fluorescence signal and offers a significant advantage as it exhibits "off-on" behavior in the presence and absence of metal ions. The primary sensor was found to be very sensitive and selective toward zinc ions.; We also aimed at optimizing the performance of this chemosensor by taking advantage of electron donating/withdrawing abilities of different functional groups by using computational methods. We devised a new scheme to synthesize it, unfortunately the modified sensor was not realized for unknown reason. We are currently involved in devising an alternate strategy to synthesize and develop new sensors for neutral molecules.