Organic small molecule fluorescent probes based cascade reaction: Design strategies, biomedical applications and prospects

The use of fluorescent probes to detect bioactive substrates provides an attractive strategy for understanding physiological and pathological processes. Among them, many fluorescent probes have been used to detect one or more targets using a cascade reaction strategy. These involved cascade reactions often lead to different cascades mechanism due to different detection substances. Moreover, the use of different cascade reactions gives the probe many benefits including: accurate detection of life processes, detection of multiple substances, and differentiation of different substances and etc. Therefore, in this review, we summarize design strategies for probes based on cascade reaction and classify these probes according to different targets. We hope that the summary of these probes based on cascade reaction will help to develop more excellent fluorescent probes and expand the application of probes in the biomedical field.