Zinc Indicators

Zinc is believed to be involved in the suppression of apoptosis and plays important roles in many neural activities. With the rich experience in neuroscience research, Creative Biolabs has developed a number of ion indicators to track zinc with intense fluorescent signals and a range of wavelength options.

Zinc Indicators at a Glance

Zinc is the second most abundant transition metal in living organisms. Zinc plays central roles in cellular processes such as gene expression, apoptosis, enzyme regulation and neurotransmission. With respect of the cellular regulation of Zn²⁺, the chelatable (free) Zn²⁺ is of special interest. Chelatable Zn²⁺ is found in relatively high concentrations in the brain, pancreas and spermatozoa. Several tools for measuring chelatable Zn²⁺ in living cells have been established to clarify its physiological significance.

How to Choose Optimal Zinc Indicators?

1. The Tripotassium salt/ Tetrapotassium salt is the water-soluble and membrane impermeant salt form of sodium indicators available for calibration purposes or for invasive loading, such as microinjection into cells or loading through a whole-cell patch electrode, as well as for in vitro calibration of the dye.

2. The acetoxymethyl (AM) ester form of sodium indicators is non-invasive and is the most popular method for loading fluorescent ion indicators into cells. These esters make the molecule hydrophobic enough to be membrane permeant. Once inside the cell, non-specific esterases found in almost all cell types, hydrolyze the esters back to the polyanionic form necessary for water-solubility, retention in the cell, and sensing ions.

*Key Factors You Need to Consider*
*Readout*	1. Responds to Zn²⁺ concentrations in synaptic vesicles with increasing fluorescence 2. Responds to saturating levels of Zn²⁺ with 50-fold increase in fluorescence emission>
*Range*	1. 0-100 µM range 2. Low nM to µM range
*Fluorophore*	1. FluoZin-1 2. FluoZin-3
*Cell permeant or impermeant?*	1. Impermeant 2. Permeant

Hot Products

Similar to the well-established probes for intracellular Ca²⁺ such as Fura-2, a range of fluorogenic Zn²⁺ indicators have been developed. Newer products could be excited in the visible range to avoid cell damage and high background fluorescence.

No1: Zinquin is an UV-excitable, blue fluorescent zinc indicator with excitation/emission at 350/460 nm.

No2: Zinquin free acid is membrane-impermeant, while Zinquin ethyl ester is membrane-permeable and is hydrolyzed into Zinquin free acid after entering cells.

*Indicator*	Product	Membrane permeability	Ex/Em
Zinc	Zinquin free acid	Impermeant	350/460 nm
Zinc	Zinquin ethyl ester	Permeant	350/460 nm

Features

Optimized for higher Zn²⁺ concentrations
Compatible with multiple analysis platforms

For interested products, please feel free to contact us for more information.

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For Research Use Only. Not For Clinical Use.