Synthesis of flavone-derived fluorescent chemosensors for detection of amino acids and studies of their photophysical and electrochemical properties.

Detection, measurement, and identification of amino acids become an important task in medicinal field due to the strong link between the deficiency of some amino acids in humans and many diseases. One of the most rapidly growing methods to analyze amino acids is by using fluorescent chemosensors. These are organic dyes that have the ability to recognize and bind to a target amino acid and consequently emit a specific light which can be detected and measured. Therefore, the interest in developing optical chemosensors arises from the fact that these probes can easily and quickly obtain fingerprints for analyzing different amino acids. Flavones represent one of the most widely exist natural products in the plant kingdom. They are responsible of the fascinating different colors of leaves and flowers as well as their well-known antioxidant activities. In this project we will try to utilize the fascinating framework of flavones in order to prepare novel chemosensors for amino acids analysis. The prepared compounds will be characterized by spectrometric and spectroscopic methods as well as by elemental analysis. The probes and their amino acids derivatives will be investigated for their spectrochemical and electrochemical properties using various techniques.