Terbium Luminescence Quenching for Bio-Swtich Applications

Fluorescence probes used in bio-switch applications utilize fluorescent interactions to provide an on-off signal indicating that the switch has interacted with some target species.Lanthanide luminescence of Tb+3 has a long emission lifetime that makes it possible to detect the emission with extremely high sensitivity using time-gated detection. This permits the suppression of all other fluorescence by a simple temporal gate. In this study multiple quenchers were investigated to obtain maximum energy transfer efficiency of the Tb+3 complex to the quencher. Quenching was observed to occur trough short-range interactions and multiple Ksv values were reported.