Rapid detection of nerve agents in environmental and biological samples using a fluorescent probe

NMU-1 showed excellent detection performance for nerve agent. And it was applied to develop a practical test paper that can detect various chemical warfare agents in this study. [Display omitted] •NMU-1 can detect nerve agent within 3 min.•NMU-1 exhibited good selectivity toward the nerve agent to various analytes.•The probe can be applied at the level of living cells.•NMU-1 was applied to develop a practical test paper that can detect various chemical warfare agents. Nerve agents are highly toxic chemical warfare agents that are easy to synthesize and have recently been applied many times in local wars and terrorist attacks. Fluorescent probes have been widely used in life science and medical research due to their features of short reaction time, high sensitivity and good selectivity. Herein, two fluorescent compounds, NMU-1 and NMU-2, were synthesized for the selective detection of nerve agents. NMU-1 exhibited good detection performance for nerve agents. With increasing nerve agent concentration, the fluorescence signal of NMU-1 at 498 nm gradually decreased with an excellent linear relationship. NMU-1 exhibited a low LOD (4.6 μM for DCP and 8.41 μM for soman), a rapid response (less than 3 min) and a large Stokes shift (98 nm) along with obvious color changes. Due to its high sensitivity and good selectivity, NMU-1 was successfully applied to image nerve agents in living PC12 cells. Furthermore, NMU-1 was used as a key element to develop chemical warfare agent test paper, which exhibited significant fluorescent changes under hand-held 365-nm UV light upon contact with nerve agents.