An iridium complex-based probe for photoluminescence lifetime imaging of human carboxylesterase 2 in living cells.

A novel photoluminescence lifetime probe (Ir-TB) has been developed for the detection and imaging of hCE2 in living cells. A large lifetime increase by around 300 ns after the enzymatic reaction makes it an ideal tool to distinguish hCE2-hydrolyzed probes from those non-hydrolyzed ones via PLIM for the first time.