A novel red-emissive probe for colorimetric and ratiometric detection of hydrazine and its application in plant imaging

With the wide application in chemistry and pharmaceutical industries, the toxic effect of hydrazine on the ecological environment (e.g. inhibition on seed germination and seedling growth) as well as human health (carcinogen) arises extensive concerns. Although a lot of probes have been developed and used for fluorescence imaging of hydrazine in living cells and animals, to our best knowledge, there are rare reports on hydrazine probe successfully applied for plants imaging. In this work, we report a novel red-emissive fluorescent probe with hydrazine-sensitive dicyanovinyl group for colorimetric and ratiometric detection of hydrazine. This newly reported probe was capable of rapidly, sensitively, and selectively detecting hydrazine with a low detection limit (2.88 ppb), and more importantly, this probe achieved the ratiometric fluorescence imaging of hydrazine in plant roots.