Abstract

Fluorescent molecules like SNARF are principally used to measure pH in liquid media. pH can be deduced from the fluorescence intensity or, often more precisely, by studying the fluorescence spectra. This allows numerical pH values to be calculated using some of the spectra shape features. Usually, the goal is to extract the contributions of the protonated and deprotonated forms of the pH indicator from the whole shape of the fluorescence spectrum and to deduce the pH value from these respective contributions. In this short paper, we show that analyzing the shape of the SNARF spectra differently allows specifying the intra-molecular origin of the processes responsible for the fluorescence emission.

Keywords

fluorescence, pH sensing, SNARF, sensitive molecules, intracellular pH, biological processes