A novel fluorescent probe for viscosity and polarity detection in real tobacco root cells and biological imaging

The disruption of lipid droplet function is associated with the pathogenesis of various diseases. Clarifying the response behavior of lipid droplets to the microenvironment at the cellular level is of great significance. Plant lipids not only exist in phospholipids in cell membranes, but also in aromatic essential oils. Monitoring the level of lipid droplets in plant cells using fluorescent probes provides a simple method for screening lipid-rich varieties. We synthesized a polarity-viscosity responsive coumarin fluorescent probe, Cou-CN, which achieved sensitive detection of polarity and viscosity in dilute solution environments by constructing this simple probe with ICT and TICT properties and verifying it using Gaussian computational simulation. Cou-CN exhibited good lipid droplet illumination effects in HepG2 cells with a correlation coefficient of 0.92 compared to the commercial lipid droplet dye BODIPY. Additionally, co-staining the probe with the lipophilic commercial dye Nile Red in tobacco root stem seedling cells resulted in a high correlation coefficient of 0.9.