Non-cytotoxic photostable monomethine cyanine platforms: Combined paradigm of nucleic acid staining and in vivo imaging

Abstract Cyanine based chemosensing platforms have successfully been employed over the past couple of decades in various fields of biomolecular sciences. Still a substantial number of recent advances and improvements on this class of compounds are reported in the art. This paper presents our latest work on the improved synthetic approach, study on photophysical properties, and biosensing applicability of monomethine cyanine dyes. The series of mono-, di- and tricationic dyes showed up to 5-fold enhanced resistance against photobleaching compared to the commercially available Thiazole Orange (TO). The title compounds were studied as potential molecular probes for the detection of deoxyribonucleic acid, demonstrating their capacity as excellent fluorescent labeling agents. Depending on the dye chemical structure, current Cl-TO compounds exhibit up to 834-fold enhanced fluorescence emission and form stable complexes with Calf Thymus-DNA. The calculated binding constants were found to be higher than several conventional fluorogenic dyes for nucleic acid detection. All studied derivatives appeared as less cytotoxic than the Thiazole Orange. IC50 concentrations in human fibroblasts MRC5 cell line were calculated up to 50 μM for the synthesized Cl-TO dyes, and 0.5 μM for the parental Thiazole Orange. Two of the dyes were found very competent in post-electrophoretic visualization of DNA. As demonstrated by the agarose gel electrophoresis, the staining efficiency and detection limits of the dyes were comparable to the widely used Ethidium Bromide. The tricationic dye revealed great potential for cell cycle analysis in G1, S and G2 phases. The chlorinated TO derivatives readily stain human cells in vivo, while they can effectively be applied for eukaryotic and microbial cell staining.