Rational design of a fluorescent probe and its applications of imaging and distinguishing between exogenous and endogenous HS in living cells.

Hydrogen sulfide (HS), a recognized environmental pollutant, comes from a wide range of sources. For example, HS will be produced in the process of plant protein corruption, the decomposition of domestic sewage and garbage, food processing (wine brewing), etc. and once the concentration is too high, it will cause significant damage of environment and human body. Besides HS is an important gas signal molecule in vivo, which can be transferred through lipid membrane. Its existence level is closely related to many diseases. If we can "visually" trace the transmembrane transmission of hydrogen sulfide, it will be very helpful for the study of oxidative stress processes, cell protection, signal transduction and related diseases closely related to HS. Although some probes can detect HS in environment, cytoplasm and organelles, there are few reports on the release and internalization of HS. In this work, we report a HS fluorescence probe that can retain on the cell membrane, named PCM. The probe PCM can not only detect endogenous and exogenous HS, but also distinguish them, this provides a general strategy for the construction of probes to detect other biomarkers. In addition, PCM has been successfully applied to the detection of endogenous and exogenous HS in zebrafish, which has the potential to become a new chemical tool and provide help for the research of HS-related diseases.