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Multicomponent reactions to facilitate the design of new fluorescent probes

By 6 de November de 2013November 18th, 2020No Comments
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Authors generated a fluorescent isonitrile able to produce a high number of fluorescent compounds. Image: UB
 06.11.2013

Multicomponent reactions to facilitate the design of new fluorescent probes

A research published on Journal of the American Chemical Society first describes the adaptation of a multicomponent reaction to the design of new fluorescent probes, which are entities of enormous interest in the field of life sciences. The article is signed by experts Rodolfo Lavilla, Anna Vázquez-Romero, Nicola Kielland and Sara Preciado, from the Department of Pharmacology and Therapeutic Chemistry at the Faculty of Pharmacy and the Barcelona Science Park, affiliated centres with the campus of International excellence BKC, together with the group led by Professor Marc Vendrell, from the University of Edinburgh (Scotland).


Bioimaging analysis technique enables to deal with some difficult problems in the field of life science. To be exact, the use of fluorescent biomarkers as sensors has been multiplied for the last years. However, chemical compounds used as markers do not have much structural diversification. Professor Rodolfo Lavilla explains that “in many cases these molecules act in a non-specific way at subcellular level. It is necessary to develop new functional applications which may provide information about the state of the detected entity”.

A fluorescent probe is a compound that binds a target molecule (for instance, a protein). Many molecules used in bioimaging have really complex structures that require many synthesis phases. Multicomponent reactions (MCRs) facilitate the synthesis of complex molecules in few phases as, in only one operation, different chemical bounds may be created simultaneously. The new scientific work gives insight into the synthesis of probes of the group BODIPY —one of the most used in the design of fluorescent probes.

“Multicomponent reactions are perfect to generate structural diversity in a quick and effective way. The article provides a new insight into multicomponent reactions”, highlights Lavilla. As a novelty, authors generated a fluorescent isonitrile able to produce a high number of fluorescent compounds which have different structural characteristics (to be exact, five representative types were prepared). The method described in the article is general and it may have several applications in the field of life sciences.

“The methodology has also enabled to discover and develop one of the derived compounds (PhagoGreen) as an element to detect phagosomes (vesicles created in the cell by endocytosis) which are functional in in vivo macrophages. It is a new element; it put some distance between it and the methods known to date, which do not allow to differentiate between immature phagosomes and active ones”, details Lavilla.