The synthesis of compounds and were achieved according to

The synthesis of compounds and were achieved according to standard procedures. As shown in , The compound 4-methyl-1-(4-sulfobutyl)quinolonium () was prepared by alkylation reaction. Compounds and were synthesized by substitution reactions between 4-fluorobenzaldehyde and , , '-trimethylethanediamine/, , ′-trimethylpropane-1, 3-diamine, respectively. The objective compounds were obtained by condensation reactions between compound () and ()/(). The compounds were characterized by H NMR, C NMR and HRMS (see the ). To evaluate the optical photophysical properties of the synthesized compounds, and were tested in different solvents (HO, DMSO, DMF, MeCN, EtOH, MeOH and DMK) by using an UV–Vis spectrophotometer and a fluorescence spectrophotometer (). Both of the two compounds showed Ranolazine spectra in the range of 490–566 nm and displayed the shortest absorption wavelength in HO and the longest in DMSO. In protic solvents, the spectra exhibited a blue shift of the with increasing of the solvent polarity, while in the aprotic solvents the compounds underwent a red shift. From the emission spectra, the fluorescence intensity evidently decreased with the increasing solvent polarity and is the lowest in water. The possible reason is that the vinylic bond between the benzene and quinolonium was rotated in water which destroys the coplanarity of the molecule, thereby resulting in the increase of the nonradiative decay process and finally the obvious quenching occurred . In addition, both of the compounds have large Stokes shifts in various solutions. The maximum values reached to 154 nm (for ) and 141 nm (for ) in water. Taken together, these spectral features are characteristic of internal charge transfer (ICT) effect upon excitation. The behaviors of and toward duplex and G-quadruplex DNA structures have been studied using fluorescence titration experiments to identify the most promising fluorescent probe. In these experiments, a fixed concentration of the compound (1 μM) was titrated against increasing concentrations of DNA. As shown in , with addition of DNA, the fluorescence intensity of the two compounds increased, suggesting there were certain interactions between DNA and compounds. The enhancements of fluorescence intensity of were found to be remarkable upon binding with different G-quadruplex DNAs, while much smaller changes were observed with double-stranded DNAs. In contrast, under the same experimental conditions, the emission changes induced by are markedly less significant than those observed with . The results hinted that the shorter-chain fatty amine side chain in the scaffold of was found to show high binding affinity and selectivity to G-quadruplex structures. For this reason, was chosen for further detailed investigation. The detailed interactions of with DNA structures were further studied by means of fluorescence and UV/visible spectroscopy. The DNA solutions were added stepwise to a 1 μM solution of in buffer and the fluorescence spectra were recorded after each addition. The titrations with all G-quadruplex DNAs resulted in a turn-on effect of the emission. a shows the emission spectra for the titration of compound with . The fluorescence emission of alone in buffer was very weak, with the gradual addition of the , an emission peak at approximately 640 nm was significantly enhanced. It is worth pointing out that the far-red region emission of with G-quadruplex DNA was observed. The increase of the emission intensity depended on the added nucleic acid structure. When treated with other G-quadruplex DNAs (, , , and ) (), similar fluorescent turn-on property was also observed. In contrast, much smaller changes were observed when titrating with duplex structures (, , and ). In order to examine whether the fluorescence enhancement of was due to its interactions with G-quadruplex secondary structure or just simply G-rich sequence, we mixed and its complementary sequence in a ratio of 1:1 to form a G-rich duplex structure. Following a similar titration protocol (b), the fluorescence intensity of the G-rich duplex structure was found to be much lower than that of G-quadruplex , which demonstrated that indeed interacted with G-quadruplex secondary structure instead of simple G-rich sequence. In addition, achieving high selectivity toward G-quadruplex DNA over duplex DNA coexisting is a very important feature to evaluate the performance of the fluorescent probe . Therefore, a competitive titration was conducted in the presence of a large excess of a duplex DNA (, 50 μM) with G-quadruplex (). At the high concentration of , a weak background fluorescent signal of was observed. The addition of led to a significant enhancement of the fluorescence intensity, although the fluorescence of was somewhat affected by the presence of duplex DNA. The results revealed that possessed excellent specificity for G-quadruplex sensing in the competitive biological environment.