Coumarin-Based Fluorescent Probes for Super-resolution and Dynamic Tracking of Lipid Droplets.

Visualizing and dynamic tracking lipid droplets (LDs) are of great importance to biological research. Herein, two-photon absorption fluorescent small bioprobes based on lipophilic coumarin were developed, which exhibited high selectivity toward LDs in HeLa cells. Because of good biocompatibility and excellent photostability, the probes were applied to realize specific super-resolution visualization of the intracellular LDs in HeLa cells, offering us the quantitative results of the amount and diameters of LDs as well. Furthermore, the bioprobes were capable of monitoring the movements of the LDs in real time. We believe that bioprobes would provide new avenues to designing bioimaging and biological diagnosis.