Macroscopic and Fluorescent Discrimination of Adenosine Triphosphate via Selective Metallo-hydrogel Formation: A Visual, Practical, and Reliable Rehearsal toward Cellular Imaging

With use of simple terpyridine zinc nitrate complexes, intriguing visual recognition of adenosine triphosphate (ATP) via selective coordination assembly leading to two-component metallo-hydrogel formation has been realized. With intensive fluorescent study and density functional theory calculations, it may be inferred, besides the selective metal-ligand interaction between Zn center and phosphate groups, the intramolecular π-stacking between the planar nucleobases of ATP and the metal-hybrid aromatic ring of pincer complex strongly affected the geometry of the coordinated adducts and possible molecular self-assembly process, which constitute a completely new sensing strategy in comparison with the conventional approaches. Furthermore, in light of extreme sensitivity of pincer zinc complexes toward ATP at micromolar scale (1.85 μM) and remarkable fluorescent enhancement (ca. 44-fold) upon ATP addition, the feasibility of the low cytotoxicity pincer zinc complexes in monitoring ATP in HeLa cells has been fulfilled with confocal fluorescence microscopy.