Studies of the labile lead pool using a rhodamine-based fluorescent probe

Lead is a heavy metal which has long been known to have toxic effects on the body. However, much remains to be learnt about the labile lead pool and cellular uptake of lead. We report here RPb1 that undergoes a 100-fold increase in fluorescence emission in the presence of Pb2+, and which can be applied to study the labile lead pool within cells. We demonstrate the capacity of RPb1 for investigating labile lead pool in DLD-1 cells and changes in labile lead during differentiation of K562 cells.