Construction of a novel fluorescent probe for sensitive determination of glyphosate in food and imaging living cells

Anal Methods. 2024 May 30;16(21):3364-3371. doi: 10.1039/d4ay00380b.

Abstract

Glyphosate is a widely used broad-spectrum herbicide in agriculture and horticulture to control a variety of weeds and undesirable plants. However, the excessive use of glyphosate has raised a number of environmental and human health concerns. It is urgent to develop tools to detect glyphosate. Herein, a novel dual-signal probe CCU-Cu2+ was designed and synthesized on the basis of CCU. CCU exhibited excellent selectivity and great sensitivity for Cu2+ which were based on both fluorescence "turn-off" reaction and comparative color visualisation methods. Due to the strong chelating ability of glyphosate on Cu2+, the CCU-Cu2+ complex was applied to glyphosate detection in practical samples. The experimental results in vitro showed that the CCU-Cu2+ complex was highly selective and rapid, with a low detection limit (1.6 μM), and could be recognised by the naked eye in the detection of glyphosate. Based on the excellent properties of the CCU-Cu2+ complex, we also constructed a smartphone-assisted detection sensing system for glyphosate detection, which has the advantages of precision, sensitivity, and high interference immunity. Moreover, the CCU-Cu2+ complex was also successfully employed for exogenous glyphosate imaging in living cells. These characteristics demonstrated that CCU-Cu2+ holds significant potential for detection and imaging of glyphosate in bio-systems.

MeSH terms

  • Copper* / analysis
  • Copper* / chemistry
  • Fluorescent Dyes* / chemistry
  • Food Analysis / methods
  • Food Contamination / analysis
  • Glycine* / analogs & derivatives
  • Glycine* / chemistry
  • Glyphosate*
  • Herbicides* / analysis
  • Herbicides* / chemistry
  • Humans
  • Limit of Detection
  • Optical Imaging / methods
  • Smartphone
  • Spectrometry, Fluorescence / methods

Substances

  • Glyphosate
  • Glycine
  • Fluorescent Dyes
  • Copper
  • Herbicides