A steroid-salen conjugate for zinc ion recognition and its applications in test-strips, living cells imaging, and cascade recognition for dihydrogen phosphate.

A novel Zn 2+ ion chemosensor 1 has been developed based on deoxycholic acid and salen motifs, and this chemosensor can be used in test-strips and living cells imaging for Zn 2+ ion through a turn-on effect. Moreover, the resulting [ 1 ·Zn 2+ ] complex exhibits turn-off response toward H 2 PO 4 − ion, thus leading to the fabrication of an INHIBIT (INH) logic gate using Zn 2+ ion and H 2 PO 4 − ion as inputs and the emission of 1 as outputs, respectively. This line of research not only enriches the library of Zn 2+ ion sensors, but also expands the applications of natural products-based chemosensors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]