Five times brighter: a recipe for glow-in-the-dark probes that watch living cells

To watch a living cell at work, biologists tag molecules with fluorescent probes — tiny beacons that glow under the microscope. Make the beacon brighter and easier to recolour, and you can see more, sooner, with less light damaging the cell. Chemists at the University of Bath have now written the recipe: by tweaking the structure of a deep-blue molecule called azulene, they mapped exactly which changes brighten the glow and shift its colour, and produced a version five times brighter than the original. The work, in Organic Chemistry Frontiers, is a design blueprint rather than a finished medical test — the team, led by Professors Simon Lewis and Tony James and Dr Dan Pantos, is honest about that. But tailor-made beacons are how researchers track the cellular changes behind diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, cancer and asthma, and a brighter beacon is a clearer view.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation