pH Resistant Ratiometric Measurement of Nicotinamide Adenine Dinucleotide Levels by Time-resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy

Circular permutation fluorescent protein is a novel method to construct biosensors. The ratio of two excitation channels is employed to quantitatively calibrate the level of analysts. SoNar is one of them, which can be used to monitor cellular NADH/NAD+ levels. However, the 490 nm excitation channel of these biosensors is sensitive to pH environments, which is negative in real applications. In this work, we demonstrated that the fractional intensity ratio extracted from time-resolved fluorescence spectroscopy could be used to quantify NADH levels with one excitation (420 nm) and one emission channels. The 420-nm excitation channel was pH resistant. Comparing to average lifetime, the fractional intensity ratio had a 3.2-fold dynamic range, which was much wider than average lifetimes.