PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Roßmann, Kilian
AU  - Akkaya, Kerem C.
AU  - Charbonnier, Corentin
AU  - Eichhorst, Jenny
AU  - Jones, Ben
AU  - Lehmann, Martin
AU  - Broichhagen, Johannes
TI  - Deuterated rhodamines for protein labelling in nanoscopy
AID  - 10.1101/2020.08.17.253880
DP  - 2020 Jan 01
TA  - bioRxiv
PG  - 2020.08.17.253880
4099  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/17/2020.08.17.253880.short
4100  - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/08/17/2020.08.17.253880.full
AB  - 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 StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.