A flavonol-derived fluorescent probe for highly specific and sensitive detection of hydrazine in actual environmental samples and living zebrafish.

Hydrazine (NH) is a significant chemical reagent and widely applied in industrial field, which can bring potential risk to environmental safety and human health due to its high toxicity and potential carcinogenicity. In this paper, a flavonol-derived fluorescent probe named TB-NH was rationally developed for detecting NH based on the excited intramolecular proton transfer (ESIPT) principle. TB-NH exhibited a remarkable fluorescence turn-on response toward NH with a large Stokes shift of 191 nm. Moreover, TB-NH could selectively recognize NH over other competitive analytes, and displayed high sensitivity toward NH with a low detection limit of 0.117 μM. The sensing mechanism of the probe TB-NH for NH was confirmed by theoretical calculation and HRMS analysis. This probe was able to quantitatively determine NH in environmental water and soil samples. Additionally, TB-NH was also successfully utilized for real-time tracking of the distribution of NH in living zebrafish.