An environmentally friendly turn-on ethyl cellulose-based fluorescent sensor with high selectivity and sensitivity for detection of hydrazine and its applications in biological and environmental systems.

Hydrazine (N₂H₄), one of the common industrial chemicals, possesses not only wide application field, but also causes serious threats to the environment and human beings. It is necessary to establish a simple, rapid and accurate method for detection of N₂H₄ in the environment and living organism. In this work, a flavonol derivative-grafted ethyl cellulose-based fluorescent probe EC-OME was designed and synthesized for the efficient detection of N₂H₄ using ethyl cellulose and flavonol derivatives as the raw materials. The structure of EC-OME was characterized with FT-IR, and the fluorescence properties of EC-OME to N₂H₄ were investigated by fluorescence spectroscopy. It was verified that this probe has good selectivity, anti-interference ability and photostability with a detection limit for N₂H₄ as low as 0.229 μM and a response time of 30 min, which can be used for determining N₂H₄ in real environmental water and soil samples. Furthermore, probe EC-OME has been successfully applied to the fluorescence imaging of N₂H₄ in live zebrafish, showing the great potential for environmental trace N₂H₄ detection.