A new imaging probes, HKGreen-4

How can people notice the water is sour or not if he is not willing to taste it? Scientists
can know the water is sour by using a test paper, Litmus paper if the Litmus paper turns red. So,
can we notice more about liquor?
Nowadays, scientists have a convenient method to detect certain chemicals, that is
using fluorescent probes. Imagine you are holding a flashlight. When you switching on the
flashlight, the flashlight would emit light. In the same sense, the flashlight is the fluorescent
probe and the reaction activated when the probe encounters the target chemicals is the action
switching on the flashlight. In short, fluorescent probe can emit light only when it encounters a
certain chemical or functional group (a portion of chemical with special structure). In is article,
we will talk about a powerful fluorescent probes, HKGreen-4 developed by professor Yang and
her research team at 2014, which is able to detect an important chemical, peroxynitrite.

Peroxynitrite, a cause of several diseases, cancer and diabetes [3]

What is peroxynitrite and why is it important? Peroxynitrite is the product of a reaction
combining two unstable and high-energy molecules (a group of atom, atom being the basic unit
to form any substances), superoxide O2- and nitric oxide NO2- (they are unstable and high-
energy chemicals).
Being high-energetic, peroxynitrite is able to oxidize (remove electrons from other
chemicals) and nitride (giving other chemicals nitrogen contained molecule) others so
peroxynitrite can react with various substances in vivo such as proteins, lipids, and enzymes.
After reacting with proteins and lipids in vivo, they would lose some function and cause some
problem. Hence, scientists assume that peroxynitrite is related to some diseases, such as
cardiovascular, cancer and diabetes. Then, scientists rise a question, how can we detect
peroxynitrite for medical research?

HKGreen-4, a selective fluorescent probes for peroxynitrite

Before introducing some detection methods, we go further on the characteristic of
peroxynitrite. Peroxynitrite is an elusive chemical, i.e. it will react with other chemicals within
10ms. Furthermore, peroxynitrite is colorless and odorless, and its structure is similar to
nitrating
species (chemicals containing a specific combination of nitrogen and oxygen atom) which
means
that we lose a lot of detection method to detect peroxynitrite and the time for detecting is very
short. Regardless of the difficulties, scientists have spent decades developing probes for
peroxynitrite, one of them is HKGreen-4.
From 2006, professor Yang, a professor of University of Hong Kong, and her research team
started to investigate a new detection method for peroxynitrite since the method before were
not
sensitive and accurate enough. At 2014, they have developed a new product, HKGreen-4.
HKGreen-4 is a fluorescent probe which are able to emit visible light when encounter a specific
group of
chemicals released by a reaction involved in peroxynitrite.
To discuss further, when the reaction is triggered, peroxynitrite would take away a group of
carbon, hydrogen and oxygen (i.e. phenol) from HKGreen-4, and give back HKGreen-4 a group
of
carbon and hydrogen atom (i.e. methyl) so HKGreen-4 would become fluorescent and emit
green
light.
The advantage of HKGreen-4
What has scientists done before? By noticing that boronic acid (an acid contained boron
atoms and carbon atoms) is able to detect peroxynitrite, the research team mentioned in
Source 2
developed an imaging probe, pnGFP, by inserting boronic acid into proteins. Compared to
HKGreen-4, the cost of producing pnGFP is high and the research team did not understand the
mechanism behind completely since pnGFP was obtained randomly.
Future of HKGreen-4
Reference
1. Peng T, Wong N K, Chen X, Chan Y K, Ho D H H, Sun Z, Hu J J, Shen J, El-Nezami H, Yang D.
Molecular imaging of peroxynitrite with HKGreen-4 in live cells and 3ssues. Journal of the
American Chemical Society. 2014 July [accessed 2018 Jan 31]; 136(33):11728-11734.
hips://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja504624q. DOI: 10.1021/ja504624q
2. Chen Z, Ren W, Wright Q E, Ai H. Gene3cally Encoded Fluorescent Probe for the Selec3ve
Detection of Peroxynitrite. 2013 September [accessed 2018 Feb 2]; 135(40):14940-14943.
hips://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/ja408011q. DOI: 10.1021/ja408011q
3. Pacher P, Beckman, J S, Liaudet L. Nitric oxide and peroxynitrite in health and disease.
Physiological reviews. 2007 January [accessed 2018 March 10]; 87(1), 315-424. hips://doi.org/
10.1152/physrev.00029.2006