ABSTRACT
Rhodamine molecules are setting benchmarks in fluorescence microscopy. Herein, we report the deuterium (d12) congeners of tetramethyl(silicon)rhodamine, obtained by isotopic labelling of the four methyl groups, which improves photophysical (i.e. brightness, lifetimes) and chemical (i.e. bleaching) properties. We explore this finding for SNAP- and Halo-tag labelling, and highlight enhanced properties in several applications, such as Förster resonance energy transfer, fluorescence activated cell sorting, fluorescence lifetime microscopy and stimulated emission depletion nanoscopy. We envision deuteration as a generalizable concept to improve existing and develop new Chemical Biology Probes.
Competing Interest Statement
The authors have declared no competing interest.
Copyright
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
Posted August 17, 2020.
