Recent advance in the development of the fluorescent responsive probes for the study of ferroptosis

Ferroptosis is an iron-dependent cell death form with the characteristic of the excessive accumulation of lipid peroxidation. In recent ten years, a host of researches suggested that ferroptosis has close correlation with numerous diseases including nervous system disease and cancer. To in-depth study the molecular mechanism and pathological functions of ferroptosis, various fluorescent responsive probes have been developed to real-time and in situ monitor the changes of bioactive species and microenvironments during ferroptosis. In this review, we summarized the recently developed fluorescent responsive probes (based on small organic molecule, nanoparticle or polymer) for the study of ferroptosis, and comprehensively discussed the design strategies, sensing performance and the imaging applications. Furthermore, we briefly provided some insights for the design of novel fluorescent responsive probes to study ferroptosis.