Positive Charges-depended Cell Targeted Staining and DNA Detection

The chemical structures or positive charges-guided specific cell organelles' staining was an interesting but very challenging research work. In this paper, we synthesized a series of triphenylamine (TPA) derivatives with mono-, di- and tri-pyridinium as substituted groups. By exchanging the negative ions (I- , BF4- and PF6-) between them, a small compounds platform was established. Afterwards, it was employed mammalian cells of HeLa and plant cells of BY-2 for the study on the cell imaging. These results clearly demonstrated that for mono-pyridinium derivatives (TPA-Py-I- , TPA-Py-BF4- and TPA-Py-PF6-), which of them are mitochondrion-targeted (for HeLa cells) and cell wall-targeted (for BY-2 cells) respectively. However, for di- and tri-pyridinium substituted derivatives (TPA-diPy-BF4- and TPA-triPy-BF4-), both of them were nucleus-targeted for both cell lines. From these important findings, we can conclude that the quantity of positive charges plays a decisive role for the different cell organelle-targeted staining. We also declared that our research result is very useful for designing and synthesizing the probes with good cellular uptake capability, significantly enhanced targeting ability, and DNA detection.