A new turn-on chemosensor for bio-thiols based on the nanoaggregates of a tetraphenylethene-coumarin fluorophore.

In this work, a tetraphenylethene-coumarin hybrid fluorophore (TPE-Cou) that contains a Schiff base form is designed and synthesized. A combination of plentiful optical properties and chemical reactivity towards thiols allows TPE-Cou to work as an excellent turn-on probe of thiols with a wide linear range, revealing the great potential of this dye as a quantitative fluorescence indicator. By means of NMR and optical spectrum analyses, a mechanistic picture at the molecular level has been drawn to illustrate how this dye works as a bio-thiol-sensitive fluorescent probe.