Abstract
Small-molecule fluorescent probes are powerful and ubiquitous tools for measuring the concentration and distribution of analytes in living cells. However, accurate characterization of these analytes requires rigorous evaluation of cell-to-cell heterogeneity in fluorescence intensities and intracellular distribution of probes. In this study, we perform a parallel and systematic comparison of two small-molecule fluorescent vesicular Zn2+ probes, FluoZin-3 AM and SpiroZin2, to evaluate each probe for measurement of vesicular Zn2+ pools. Our results reveal that SpiroZin2 is a specific lysosomal vesicular Zn2+ probe and affords uniform measurement of resting Zn2+ levels at the single cell level with proper calibration. In contrast, FluoZin-3 AM produces highly variable fluorescence intensities and non-specifically localizes in the cytosol and multiple vesicular compartments. We further applied SpiroZin2 to lactating mouse mammary epithelial cells and detected a transient increase of lysosomal free Zn2+ at 24-hour after lactation hormone treatment, which implies that lysosomes play a role in the regulation of Zn2+ homeostasis during lactation. This study demonstrates the need for critical characterization of small-molecule fluorescent probes to define the concentration and localization of analytes in different cell populations, and reveals SpiroZin2 to be capable of reporting diverse perturbations to lysosomal Zn2+.