Smart Fluorescent Dyes

Modulating photo- and electroluminescence in a stimuli-responsive molecular dye

17-Aug-2018 - Controlling the excited electronic states in luminescent systems remains a challenge in the development of fluorescent and phosphorescent dyes. Now, scientists in Japan have developed a unique organic fluorophore that changes its emission color without loss of efficiency when externally ...

Color Change Unmasks Lead

Triplex-signal chemosensor for naked eye and spectrometric lead detection

29-May-2018 - Environmental lead exposure is one of the most significant public health threats worldwide. Consequently, reliable, quick, inexpensive, and easy-to-handle lead assays are urgently needed. Scientists have now presented a novel chemosensor for lead. It offers a triplex signal upon binding of lead ...

Dying Brightly

Fluorescence lights up cells programmed to die

28-Jan-2013 - Programmed cell death, or apoptosis, occurs tens of millions of times every day in every human body. Researchers in South Korea have devised an easy method to detect apoptotic cells by fluorescence, as they report in Chemistry—An Asian Journal. Their method makes it easier to detect improper ...

New ways to diagnose skin cancer?

09-Mar-2012 - A biopsy is a painful and scarring but often unavoidable procedure, to decide whether a suspicious looking region on the skin is cancer or a harmless spot. Now, scientists attained promising results of autofluorescence and reflectance measurements of tissue as a noninvasive approach for basal ...

Surfaces and Interfaces: Innovative techniques allow researchers to study interfaces with great precision

26-Nov-2010 - Equipment built by German scientists can be used to study processes at interfaces with great accuracy. In an article published recently in ChemPhysChem, Hans Joachim Freund and co-workers of the Fritz-Haber-Institut in Berlin describe the advancement of four experimental techniques developed in ...

Move to the red!

Design and synthesis of rigid fluorophores

15-Sep-2010 - Stable dyes with sharp absorption and fluorescence emission bands in the red or NIR region of the spectrum, combined with high molar absorption coefficients and high fluorescence quantum yields, may find extensive use in many different fields, such as optical engineering, analytical chemistry, ...

Smaller and Sharper: Nanoscale Metal–Organic Frameworks (NMOFs) as MRI Contrast Agents

12-Jul-2010 - Developing more sensitive methods of biomedical imaging that are effective with minimal amounts of contrast agents is an important challenge in the early and accurate diagnosis of illnesses. A new class of materials that appear promising in this quest were introduced in 2006 by Prof. Wenbin Lin ...

Written in Red

Red-Emitting Dyes for Optical Microscopy and Nanoscopy

08-Jul-2010 - Far-field optical nanoscopy methods, especially STED (stimulated emission depletion), pose very strict and, at times, contradictory requirements on the utilized fluorescent markers. Photostable fluorescent dyes that absorb in the red optical region are indispensable as labels for various micro- ...

Dot Products: Analytical Applications of Enzymatic Growth of Quantum Dots

18-Jun-2010 - The search for time and cost effective as well as sensitive methods for bioanalytical assays is currently of great interest. At the center of Biofunctional Nanomaterials in San Sebastian (Spain), Valery Pavlov and his co-workers are undertaking research in the area of the design and preparation ...

F is for Fluoresence and Fluorine

New dyes for optical nanoscopy

30-Mar-2010 - The imaging of living cells at the molecular level was barely a dream twenty years ago. Today, however, this dream is close to becoming reality. In the Max Planck Institute for NanoBiophotonics in Göttingen, Stefan Hell has developed fluorescence microscopy methods for observing objects on the ...