Dual Functional Small Molecule Probes as Fluorophore and Ligand for Misfolding Proteins.

Misfolding of a protein is a destructive process for variety of diseases that include neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson disease, Huntington disease, mad cow disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), and frontal temporal dementia (FTD), and other non-CNS diseases such as diabetes, cystic fibrosis, and lysosomal storage diseases. Formation of various misfunctional large assembles of the misfolded protein is the primary consequence. To detect the formation of the aggregated species is very important for not only basic mechanism research but also very crucial for diagnosis of the diseases. In this review, we updated references related to the new development of the dual functional fluorescent small molecule probes for detecting the aggregated proteins in vitro and in vivo.