A simple coumarin-based system for the effective detection of superoxide in bacteria

Superoxide anion is a highly reactive ROS however the sensing of this species is relatively unexplored. The current methods to sense superoxide requires the construction of complex probes which are often hard to synthesize. With this research we report a simple one step high yielding (90%) method to prepare a probe for the detection of O2.- in bacteria using a coumarin core and trifluoromethanesulfonate locking group.