Discovery of novel ursolic acid derivatives as effective antimicrobial agents through a ROS-mediated apoptosis mechanism

In response to the reduction of food production and economic losses caused by plant bacterial diseases, it is necessary to develop new, efficient, and green pesticides. Natural products are rich and sustainable source for the development of new pesticides due to their low toxicity, easy degradation, and eco-friendliness. In this study, we prepared three series of ursolic acid derivatives and assessed their antibacterial ability. Most target compounds exhibited outstanding antibacterial activities. Among them, the relative optimal EC50 values of Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae and Xanthomonas axonopodis pv. citri were 2.23 (A17) and 1.39 (A16) μg·mL^(-1), respectively. The antimicrobial mechanism showed that compound A17 induced an excessive accumulation and production of reactive oxygen species in bacteria and damaged the cell membrane integrity to kill bacteria. More interestingly, the addition of low concentrations of exogenous hydrogen peroxide enhanced the antibacterial efficacy of compound A17 against Xanthomonas oryzae pv. oryzae. These entertaining results suggested that compound A17 induced an apparent apoptotic behavior in the tested bacteria. Overall, we developed the promising antimicrobial agents that destroyed the redox system of phytopathogenic bacteria, further demonstrating the unprecedented potential of ursolic acid for agricultural applications.

Structural modification of BODIPY: Improve its applicability

BODIPY has been considered a potential scaffold because of their neutral total charge, sharp absorption,and emission with high fluorescence quantum yield. However, the drawback of emission wavelength at less than 600 nm and hydrophobicity limit its application. One of the extremely interesting properties of BODIPY is that small modifications to their structures could be able to tune their properties, mainly including the absorption/emission wavelength and the hydrophilicity. This review focuses on the modification at different positions of BODIPY to improve the water-solubility and emission wavelength that describe their spectral, photophysical properties and applicability, which is helpful for the researchers to rationally design BODIPY dyes to adapt a wide range of applications.

Synthesis and application of highly sensitive fluorescent probe for Hg2＋ regulated by sulfur

Rhodamine-based fluorescent probe is widely used in chemical analysis, environmental analysis and life sciences area due to their excellent optical properties. Based on the thiophilic property of Hg2＋, using C = S structural motif as the core segment, our group have designed and synthesized three novel probes containing cinnamyl aldehyde with different substituents, exhibiting high selectivity and excellent sensitivity. The structure-property relationships of these probes have been investigated that the optical change caused by electron withdrawing effect and heavy atom effect. Furthermore, these Hg2＋ probes could be applied in living mice imaging, which provide a promising tool for quantitative mercury（Ⅱ） ion imaging in living organism.