Sensitive fluorescence “turn-on” detection of bleomycin based on a superquenched perylene–DNA complex†
Abstract
Bleomycins (BLMs) are widely used in the clinical treatment of various cancers. Here, taking advantage of the super-quenching effect of the cationic perylene diimide derivative (PDI) on adjacent fluorophores, we reported a PDI–DNA complex based method for fluorescence “turn-on” detection of BLM, based on BLM–Fe(II) mediated DNA strand scission. Owing to the very high quenching efficiency of aggregated PDI, the method shows low background fluorescence and high sensitivity with a detection limit of 0.2 nM. It also exhibits a good performance in complex biological samples. Moreover, this method has the advantages of no quencher labelling cost, easy preparation and rapid response, making it a promising alternative for the determination of trace amounts of BLMs in clinical samples.